The Language of Newspapers: Socio-Historical Perspectives

Advances in Sociolinguistics
Series Editors: Professor Sally Johnson, University of Leeds

Dr Tommaso M. Milani, University of the Witwatersrand

Since the emergence of sociolinguistics as a new field of enquiry in the late
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Acknowledgements

and how you can dispute, therefore, that a newspaper is one huge
repertory of the vices which writers should avoid, and so a widely
circulating medium of literary demoralization, I fail to see.

‘Newspapers and English: A Dialogue’

Macmillan’s Magazine, 1886

A book which attempts to make certain connections between the fields
of linguistics, history and journalism studies, first needs editorial
enthusiasm and support if it is ever going to emerge into the world
printed and bound or even shimmering on a screen. These were pro-
vided by Gurdeep Mattu as commissioning editor and his editorial
assistant, Colleen Coalter, at Continuum together with Sally Johnson
and later by Tommaso Milani, as series editors. In the process of bring-
ing the manuscript to completion, Mr P. Muralidharan in Chennai
adequately demonstrated the benefits of global cooperation and proved
that geographical distance in no hindrance to courtesy. I hope the
finished product goes some way towards repaying their collective
confidence in the project.

I am grateful to Scott Dawson and Karen Lee for facilitating permis-

sion to use Gale digital archives as well as Samantha Tillett at the British
Library. Beyond the essential provision of material resources, Ed King,
Head of Collections at the British Newspaper Library, Colindale has
consistently lent his energetic support to this and all other projects,
both successful and thwarted, which attempt to shed light on the history
and fabric of newspapers.

At the University of Sheffield, the intellectual generosity and friend-

ship of John Steel and Adrian Bingham have been the chief sources of
inspiration in enabling me to work in the interdisciplinary style which
I hope is represented in the book. I am grateful to the University of
Sheffield for the generous provision of a sabbatical semester and the
leafy splendor of Nether Edge which, combined, allowed sufficient
peace and calm to complete this project. The administrative staff in the
Department of Journalism Studies especially Amanda Burton and Susie
Whitelam have continued to furnish an air of calm efficiency where
creativity has the opportunity to prosper while Alastair Allan, as our
subject specialist librarian, has championed the provision of digital

vii

resources in the university library and has provided constant advice
and strategic support.

Many colleagues past and present, too numerous to mention, may

recognize shared enthusiasms and conversations in the pages of this
book. My thanks to them for their patience and advice but most espe-
cially to Jane Taylor and Bob Franklin who have encouraged me simply
to persevere. To all of these people, I owe a great debt of thanks which
I sincerely trust is reflected in these pages. If the book falls short of its
ambitions in any way then, as is customary, I must point out that it is
through no shortage of support but due to the failings of the author.

Simone and Lara – Die Wilden Hühner – as always, take most credit

for providing the alternative space which makes it all worthwhile and
it is to them that the book is dedicated.

Acknowledgements

Structure and focus of the book

This book will deal with the very stuff of newspapers; their language.
It will chart the various ways in which the shape and content of that
language has impacted upon social and political debates over four
centuries, from the first emergence of periodical publications in the
seventeenth century to the present day. In turn, it will also assess the
opposite force in this relationship; the influences of political and social
changes on newspapers and how these changes have become manifest
in their use of language. It hopes to be able to add a much-needed his-
torical perspective to wider contemporary debates about the social
implications of the language of the news media (Johnson and Ensslin,
2007). In doing so, it will aim to initiate a critical as well as a produc-
tive dialogue between sociolinguistics and journalism studies.

The book will highlight the ways in which newspapers have needed

to accommodate social, political and technological changes throughout
their history. It will take as its starting point the observation of Bell
(1984: 145–204), rooted itself in sociological understanding, that jour-
nalism is an ‘exercise in audience design’. This perspective emphasizes
that the language of newspapers has always encapsulated what would
sell to audiences and how information could best be packaged and pre-
sented to achieve this commercial end at any particular time. Newspapers
have therefore always attempted to fit into the tastes of their reader-
ships and sought ways to echo these within their own idiom, thereby
reconstructing the ‘original’ audience in the process. Despite their
underlying commercial imperative, this need to provide a distinctive
language in which to give a coherent editorial expression to readers’
tastes has had both conservative and radical implications at different
moments in the history of the newspaper.

In structural terms, the chronology of the book will provide a long view

of the changes in the language of newspapers. In doing so, it will require a
certain indulgence from the reader in accepting a broad definition of news-
papers to include earlier influential periodical publications which played
a role in the formation of what later became identifiable as the newspaper.
It will begin by considering the revolutionary implications of the first

Introduction: The social nature of
newspaper language

The Language of Newspapers

periodical publications in England and how their use of language
quickly began to fuel a radically changing social and political order.
This frenetic period may have come to an end with the Restoration of
the monarchy in 1660 but the precedent of a regular distribution of
news in print or manuscript form had been established and enabled the
honing of a style of address which was suited to political and economic
circumstances, as well as acceptable to a gradually broadening reader-
ship. Following a degree of political liberalization after the lapse of the
Licensing Act in 1695, periodical print publications began to experi-
ment once again with form as well as content and subsequently, the
eighteenth century saw the consolidation of a bourgeois style of politi-
cal engagement through the medium of periodical news production.
It is this political engagement which Habermas (1992) has termed the
bourgeois public sphere. Political interventions in support of popular
causes effected a division between the language of the politically
respectable bourgeois newspaper and that of radical periodical pam-
phlets in the first half of the nineteenth century which has been seen as
the zenith of the influence of the ‘publicists’ in print (Chalaby, 1998).
This was followed by a period during which newspapers learned how
to make increasing profits from addressing broader social audiences in
a language that matched the aspirations of those readers (Lee, 1976).
The end of the nineteenth century saw the fusion, within the daily
popular press in England, of certain populist techniques in newspaper
language and layout, which had been developed commercially in the
United States (Baldasty, 1992). These techniques, often identified as
the New Journalism (Wiener, 1988), were ultimately to spread their
influence throughout the entire newspaper industry.

The twentieth-century newspaper’s language was shaped by a wave

of technologies competing with the newspaper as the prime provider of
topical information about the world. First radio, then television, satel-
lite and most recently the internet have all forced newspapers to alter
the structure and address of their language as they bid to retain a profit-
able and influential share of the market for news and entertainment.
Out of the patterns of these media interventions over the twentieth
century, one form of newspaper language has been developed to such
an extent that its influence is to be observed everywhere: the tabloid.
It would be no exaggeration to say that it was indeed the tabloid century,
as the style of this language has had profound social and political effects
upon the wider contemporary media world.

In newspapers today, we are witnessing the latest linguistic accom-

modation to changing social and commercial pressures. Newspapers
have always striven to provide an elaborated form of conversation with
their audiences, to be something more than a dry account of the events

Introduction

of the day. What they are now pressed to do is to provide a version of
that daily conversation in an environment that has many other techno-
logies competing to provide that sense of communal voice. The book
will complete its survey by considering how newspapers of the present
are dealing in their latest struggle to survive and how their language
is adapting to the existence of so many other forms of contemporary
communication flow. The longer historical perspective of the book will
allow the reader to assess the extent to which this adaptation represents
a novel departure or a reconfiguration of older social functions of their
language.

Language as social activity

One of the common limitations of most books about newspapers within
the tradition of media studies (Curran: 2002) is that they tend to stick to
accounts of institutional and political contexts, leading them to ignore
broader questions about their role as an integral part of social history.
One problem associated with this approach is that newspapers are dealt
with very much as commercial/political products with very little regard
for the social specifics of their language. A second limitation is that by
concentrating merely on the commercial or political contexts of news-
papers, there is an implication that the language that they employ is a
rather static commodity in the service of the dynamics of life outside
their pages. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the view of this
author, the language of newspapers is the most vital and dynamic aspect
of their history. A third limitation is that by neglecting the importance
of the language of newspapers as a significant element in their social
appeal, society itself is implicitly constructed as something which sits
outside language. This book would like to encourage a more energized
interpretation of the relationship between language and the social audi-
ence implicit in the newspaper’s text and layout. The idealized readers,
constructed within the language of the newspaper, are very much part
of the meaning-making process of the newspaper, as they are of news
production generally (Scollon, 1998), not simply passive vessels for
information.

Language is a thoroughly social activity and newspapers extend that

activity beyond the confines of face-to-face discourse to an extended,
imagined community of kinship based on nation (Anderson, 1986;
Billig, 1995; De Cillia, Reisigl and Wodak, 1999; Conboy, 2006). News-
paper language materializes that identity quite literally onto the page.
There has been a burgeoning interest in the specifics of the language of
news media and its social implications (Bell, 1991; Van Dijk, 1991;
Fairclough, 1995a 1995b; Conboy, 2007a; Richardson, 2007; Montgomery,

The Language of Newspapers

2007) while recent studies of the early history of newspapers have gone
a long way to establishing a linguistic emphasis within studies of the
emergence of periodical publications in England (Sommerville, 1996;
Raymond, 1996 1999). What this project attempts to add is a bridge
between the two traditions of journalism studies and discourse analysis
and one which can provide a synoptic analysis of the impact of news-
paper language over time. Placing language at the forefront of the study
of newspapers reinforces the point that:

. . . a concept of a language cannot stand isolated in an intellectual
no-man’s land. It is inevitably part of some more intricate complex
of views about how certain verbal activities stand in relation to
other human activities, and hence, ultimately, about man’s [sic]
place in society. (Harris, 1980: 54)

Accounts which downgrade the social role of language in the history of
newspapers can fall into the trap which Cameron (1990) identifies as
the ‘language reflects society’ model. She articulates the restrictions of
such a view:

The first problem is its dependence on a naïve and simplistic social
theory . . . Secondly, there is the problem of how to relate the social
to the linguistic (however we conceive the social). The ‘language
reflects society’ account implies that social structures somehow
exist before language, which simply ‘reflects’ or ‘expresses’ the
more fundamental categories of the social . . . language . . . [is a] part
of the social, interacting with other modes of behaviour and just as
important as any of them. (Cameron, 1990: 81–82)

This restricted view is, of course, a regular cliché within lazy-minded
interpretations of the role of the newspaper itself as ‘mirroring society’.
To counter that view, this book restores language as a centrally impor-
tant social intervention to the study of the newspaper arguing with
Hodge and Kress that language is:

a key instrument in socialization, and the means whereby society
forms and permeates the individual’s consciousness . . . signifying
social behaviour. (Hodge and Kress, 1993: 1)

Theoretical perspectives

Having asserted that we cannot consider language without its social
context, it is appropriate to move on to briefly consider a range of ideas
about language and society that this book will draw upon which have
direct relevance to a historical study of the language of newspapers.
It is to be hoped that by making explicit the theoretical claims of the

Introduction

argument in the early stages, the rest of the book can concentrate on
providing a rich illustration of the varied language of the newspaper
within that theoretical context without too much in the way of diver-
sion. The narratives of newspapers place them unmistakenly in their
times. In turn, the historical sweep and the specifics of a particular era
are formative of the language of newspapers, meaning that the social
character of these texts is therefore both thematic and structural. Many
contemporary accounts of language and society consider that language
is profoundly implicated in power structures in society (Foucault,
1974; Fairclough, 1995a 1995b; Hodge and Kress, 1993). The early
destabilization of social hierarchies by periodical publications from the
seventeenth century covered in this account is a first and clear testa-
ment to this, as well as being an indication of the potential for interaction
between social and textual formations. Russian theorist Bakhtin (1996)
provides one of the most subtle and persuasive accounts of how lan-
guage is used as a key site of struggle between conflicting social forces:
all of which wish to constrain meaning to their own ends and therefore
give direction to communication within their own preferred definitions
in order to achieve their own goals.

The key terms which we will borrow from Bakhtin are ‘dialogue’, and

‘heteroglossia’ in this introduction and ‘carnivalesque’ in relation to
discussions of tabloid newspapers and the much contested process of
‘tabloidization’ flowing from these newspapers later in the book.
Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia fits well with the mapping of the his-
tory of newspaper language. It can assist in problematizing the constant
power struggles over which features of newspapers have had the greatest
impact on the social and political worlds at any given time and through
this theoretical lens, newspaper language can be observed as a highly
contested dialogic space where the struggle over hierarchies of commu-
nicative control has persisted across different historical periods.

Heteroglossia is Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the fact that all lan-

guage transactions take place in the context of potentially alternative
expressions. They are structured between the centrifugal potential of
the multiplicity of contesting voices of heteroglossia and the centripetal
tendencies which allow language to retain a socially shared coherence.
Heteroglossia traditionally contests the dominant social-linguistic
norms. The concept foregrounds the linguistic nature of our experience
of the world as it is narrated to us and through us, drawing on a vast
array of voices and modes of communication, all vying in particular
times and places for our attention. This has a particular relevance to
the role of the newspaper which has evolved with a range of competing
and overlapping functions. These include informational, political,
entertainment, normative/integrationist creation of social identities,

The Language of Newspapers

agenda-setting and consumerist all within increasingly complex
networks of a more integrated and wider mediasphere. Journalism is
defined in each era by its particular engagement with politics, technol-
ogy, economics and culture. Dahlgren is one leading commentator who
appreciates this diversity and stresses that the ‘cultural discourse’
(1988: 51) of journalism is not simply informational but a part of a
broader set of symbolic representation. This multiplicity and generic
variation has always formed part of newspaper journalism’s resilience
and vitality and explains much of its ability to realign within different
historical and political settings (Conboy, 2004: 224).

One of the tasks of the newspaper is to close down a potentially infi-

nite heteroglossia into a unified editorial voice but one which still may
appear to draw on the energies of a multiplicity of voices and attitudes.
All the newspaper’s appeal as a popular product lies in its successful
reconciliation between these two poles of unity and multiplicity. Within
the heteroglossia of cultural discourse, however, newspapers’ style and
content remain determined ultimately by the voice of the political
economy because they have always needed to make a profit through
their selection of generic variety and political pragmatism.

Newspapers over time have adapted to articulate particular variants

of language for particular social groups as Bakhtin may have envisaged.
From the aspirations of the emergent bourgeoisie as a dominant eco-
nomic and political grouping in the eighteenth century, articulating its
new-found identity in the periodical press (Eagleton, 1991), through
the era of radical engagement with political and social reform in the
early nineteenth century, to the commercialization of the voice of the
ordinary working classes in the Daily Mirror of the period 1934–1969,
we can see the sort of social stratifications of language in newspaper
form which had attracted the attention of Bakhtin to the work of
Rabelais in a literary form at a very different historical juncture. Within
their history there has been a constant struggle between differing claims
on the functions and aims of newspapers. Accounts of newspapers
which prioritize both their commercial concerns as well as their related
reputation for scrutiny of the powerful in society (their supposed
watchdog function) have predominated in historical assessments of
the newspaper through history (Fox-Bourne, 1998; Siebert, 1965; Koss,
1981 and 1984) but accounts of discourses resistant to this politically
conservative and economically subservient style of newspaper con-
tinue to resonate. Harrison (1974), Atton (2002) Atton and Hamilton
(2008) all provide evidence of how the subordinate survives within
oppositional discourses as too do the discourses of ethical journalism
(Frost, 2007; Harcup, 2006) and accounts which highlight the need for
journalism to survive as a counterbalance to the interests of the powerful

Introduction

despite the decline of the watchdog functions of journalism within the
contemporary political economy of newspapers (Lewis et al., 2008a;
O’Neill and O’Connor, 2008; Davies, 2008). There continues, therefore,
to be a set of variable, social and political claims on the language and
function of the newspaper, yet they remain constrained within a set of
dominant perspectives and within historically specific social forma-
tions. This is what makes the language of newspapers such an important
topic from a socio-historical point of view. It can be investigated to see
how its dominant patterns fitted into or challenged social and political
structures at different points in history. The proliferation of styles of
newspaper language to address competing expectations and demands
has complex implications:

. . . it can be seen that the social purposes of journalism are contra-
dictory. Some are overt (entertainment, factuality, impartiality,
objectivity) some covert (social control, ideological commitment,
legitimation) and the overt and the covert purposes do not mesh
easily. It is perhaps not surprising that in a situation of such contra-
dictory generic demands a rich array of generic strategies has
developed. (Van Leeuwen, 1987: 209)

The issue of genre has particular importance for this study since, as
well as having stylistic characteristics, genre is also a form of social
contract between writer and reader. A reader knows what to expect
from a particular genre or combination of genres (Swales, 1990) and
takes his/her place in the strategic social complexity of these expecta-
tions (Fairclough, 2005: 71). These expectations form part of a shared
sense of community in reading and are an important contributor to the
social aspects of writing. Generic patterns and the expectations of read-
ers of newspapers have always been conditioned within such social
parameters. Miller (1994) argues that genre functions as a way of under-
standing how to participate in the activities of a community. As such,
genre is located within a wider set of cultural patterns and in studying
the particular features of these patterns over time we can begin to
understand more about the ways in which readers shared their social
knowledge. Newspaper language can be seen very much as a ‘social
semiotic’ (Halliday, 1978) which, in its generic range, draws particular
social groups into particular styles of presentation.

Newspapers have always created readers, not news, as their primary

function. They are ‘language forming institutions’ (Bell, 1991: 7),
informing as well as responding to broader linguistic trends and con-
tributing to the ‘emergent property of social interaction’ (Pennycook,
2004: 7). Yet, even within the informational function of the newspaper,
there have always been ideological implications in the transmission of

The Language of Newspapers

information for particular audiences. Newspapers function to create
public identities for social groups as well as for individuals within
those groups though the range of textual strategies identified by
Fairclough (2003: 213–221). This view of the language of newspapers
complements the ‘ritual view of communication’ espoused by Carey
(1989) who argued that the media, and for our purposes this can be
applied to the more specific medium of the newspaper, are far more
concerned with the re-creation and reconfirmation of social groups
than they are with the transmission of information per se. Language is
a fundamental aspect of this ritualization, each group recognizing
its own vernacular and each newspaper trying its best to maintain a
particular brand of language to hold together its own social, geographi-
cal, demographic and political readership.

Another perspective from linguistics which can be deployed to

understand the social history of the language of the newspaper comes
from Ferdinand de Saussure (1966). Semiology encourages us to create
a distance from the everyday routines of linguistic performance, to see
language in a denaturalized way. It does this by creating a series of
binary oppositions some of which have implications for our study of the
language of the news media. One of the most useful of these for our
analytical purposes is that of langue/parole. For de Saussure, langue
[the structure of language] and parole [the more malleable performance
of everyday speech] play an essential role in the function of language.
These poles have a special relevance to the language of newspapers.
Langue can be interpreted as the systematic structuring of language as
news within institutional norms of news value (Harcup and O’Neill,
2001) or house style (Cameron, 1996); parole as the vernacular echoes
of a socially targeted, idealized audience. This binary dynamic is a point
which is endorsed in the interplay between the individual and the insti-
tutional in the interpretation of journalism by Bourdieu: ‘. . . even if the
actors have an effect as individuals, it is the structure of the journalistic
field that determines the intensity and orientation of its mechanisms, as
well as their effects on other fields’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 73). Although he
was thinking more of the journalist as actor rather than the reader at this
point of his argument, the oppositional dynamic between individual
and structure and the effect of this dynamic on the production of the
newspaper’s language remains valid. Newspapers have always provided
a constant negotiation between these perspectives as they attempt to
maintain a grip on that language of the quotidian par excellence, the
news. Moreover, the ‘essential relatedness of language and history’
(Crowley, 1990: 29–37) is clarified according to Crowley through de
Saussure’s analytical framing, ensuring that the relationship is not an
‘external’ factor to the main business of linguistic study.

Introduction

This inter-relatedness explains how a relatively stable worldview

retains coherence for an audience over time. Newspaper language can
only function in a way which accepts the historical rooting of that lan-
guage as an essential part of its context. An obvious example would be
the way that the anniversaries of war are commemorated, where the
past is the central point of the contemporary story (Conboy, 2007a)
and where the reader is expected to make the connection for them-
selves from within the accepted cultural framework of the newspaper’s
language (Conboy, 2007a: 97).

A first definition of discourse is in terms of the coexistence of text

and context and the impossibility of understanding one without the
other or prioritizing one as more important than the other. Both text
and context are complex, as is their inter-relationship. Broadly speak-
ing, linguists choose to use the term discourse as describing the
coexistence of text and context, and the regularities present in any
stretch of language longer than a sentence (Crystal, 1991: 106). This
implies that there can be, from the perspective of a discursive analysis,
no utterance which can be divorced from the circumstances of its
production and reception, beyond the utterance itself in its intercon-
nections with other linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena, without
losing an essential part of its meaning: its context. The relevance of this
to the language of newspaper journalism is clear. It means that we must
always keep in mind the multiple relationships of journalism with soci-
ety, within the economy, with politics and also as a relatively autonomous
cultural practice in its own right with its own traditions. Journalism
can be viewed as an intersection of many conflicting interests, some of
which, at some points in history, have clearer priority than others.

Discourse, in the second sense in which it is often used in contem-

porary debates around language and culture, is a term influenced by the
writing of Michel Foucault (1974). This definition too has a direct rele-
vance to newspapers as it is predominantly concerned with the social
function of language. This view of discourse claims that the language
used about a particular practice in turn constructs the object of which
it speaks meaning that this journalistic medium is therefore made up of
the claims and counter-claims of a variety of speakers on its behalf.
What journalists say about their work, what critics and political com-
mentators say about journalism, the perceived effects of the language of
journalism on society, the patterns of popularity among readers and
viewers of journalism all take their place in defining the discourse of
journalism. Discourses, according to Foucault, are also intrinsically
bound up with questions of power since they give expression to the
meanings and values of institutions or practices and, in doing so, claim
authority for themselves. The discourse of journalism defines, describes

The Language of Newspapers

and limits what it is possible to say with respect to journalism, whether
at its margins or at its institutional core. It describes the ways in which
it is possible to think about and criticize the characteristic practices of
journalism. One advantage of considering journalism in this way is to
once again denaturalize certain common-sense assumptions made
about it and enable us to criticize them and question their logic. Fur-
thermore, this approach also assists in assessing how the dominant
opinions in debates over journalism’s power and value have altered
over time. Certainly, over time, many aspects of journalism can be
regarded discursively such as the freedom of the press, the news media
as a ‘Fourth Estate’, the objectivity of journalism, the normative politi-
cal functions of journalism or what journalism should and should not
do and the often obscured economic imperative of journalism – its
political economy.

Another advantage of considering newspaper language as a discourse

is that it enables us to view news production and dissemination as cre-
ating new forms of power as well as new forms of access to representation.
Journalism has never simply contested a sort of political power which
lay outside its own sphere of influence. It has always been deeply
involved in the creation of power structures – particularly those
involved in public communication. One of the most widespread falla-
cies, the Whig account of journalism (cf Curran and Seaton, 2003) sees
journalism as the triumphant march of the political emancipation of
Western societies as enacted through the news media (Siebert, 1965).
Journalism has contributed itself to this account and draws upon it as a
way of legitimating its relationship with the political status quo.
Considering journalism as a discourse disrupts this account and high-
lights its contested nature as well as encouraging us to see it as the sum
of the variety of practices which it has incorporated over the centuries.
Much of journalism’s resilience and vitality come, in fact, from its ability
to adapt to changes in cultural and economic imperatives. Writing spe-
cifically about newspapers, Black sees their history as being profoundly
informed by the changes necessary within a competitive market:

Change is therefore a central theme in newspaper history, not
only because of its occurrence, and the speed of its occurrence, but
also as the awareness of change creates a sense of transience and
opportunity. Each period of English newspaper history can be pre-
sented as one of transformation, shifts in content, production,
distribution, the nature of competition, and the social context.
(Black, 2001: 1)

Foucault’s view of language as playing a central role in maintaining
social control and delimiting social and political change through the

Introduction

operation of discourse is one which has been influential in developing
theories of critical discourse analysis which have been applied to news-
paper language most notably by (Fowler, 1991; Van Dijk, 1991; Wodak,
2001; Jäger, 2001; Cameron, 1996; Billig, 1995; Fairclough, 1995 a and b
and 2003). Within this discursive environment, readers can be ‘mani-
pulated and informed, preferably manipulated while they suppose they
are being informed’ (Hodge and Kress, 1993: 6). Voluntarist and institu-
tionalist concepts of language (Joseph and Taylor, 1990: 11) are involved
in the power struggle over the identity of newspaper discourse since it
invites deliberation on whether it is constructed predominantly by
individuals (printers, politically engaged citizens, royalty, political
authority) or by an institutionalized set of norms which act, even at the
birth of the newspaper acted to constrain in order to meet social and
political expectations. The struggle over the resolution of these ques-
tions is what forms the discourse of the newspaper. What Said has
expressed more generally in connection with writing has resonance for
the formation of the discourse of the newspaper more specifically:

writing is no private exercise of a free scriptive will but rather the
activation of an immensely complex tissue of forces for which a text
is a place among other places where the strategies of control in soci-
ety are conducted. (Said, 1978: 673–714)

Historical perspectives on the operation of these discourses through the
language of newspapers can demonstrate how these are not static but
attempt to manoeuvre to maintain maximum control in changing politi-
cal and economic circumstances. This approach is, in fact, most
productive when considering the shifts in newspaper language over
time and the social and political implications of these shifts (Jucker,
2005).

Conclusion

The book will provide an outline of the changes in the language of
newspapers in the context of the sociolinguistic debates briefly sketched
above and the importance of those changes to the societies they were
produced for and which they structured in the process of reporting
them. Changes in language/format could be prompted by political
changes in control or in experimentation due to a weakening of direct
control; they could also be triggered by the need to differentiate for par-
ticular markets or to accommodate changes in technology. Particular
phases of the development of the language of newspapers have encom-
passed particular engagements between language and the social and
political structures dominant at those times. The book will endeavour

The Language of Newspapers

to demonstrate how certain developments took place in negotiation
with broader factors. These developments will be illustrated by exam-
ples from newspapers at key moments. At times, the interests of
newspaper language were in keeping with the political ambitions of
leading groups; at other times it was in conflict with them; at others, it
was a commercially pragmatic compromise between the needs of read-
ers and the needs of owners and politicians. What we are left with is
often a classic Gramscian hegemonic settlement, where the acquisition
of power depends as much on the consent or resignation of those disen-
franchised as it does upon the might of those with the instruments of
communicative authority at their disposal and where this consent is
threaded through with the subtle workings of ideology, defined as a
form of political common sense. The discursive interpretation of hege-
mony articulated by Laclau and Mouffe (1985) has particular relevance
for the interpretation of newspaper language as a site of struggle over
competing social and political views of the power of readers as informed
citizens. While we are often presented with accounts of the history of
newspapers in terms of claims to ‘freedom of speech’, ‘objectivity’,
‘impartiality’ and the ‘public interest’, these are already deeply embed-
ded in the particular discursive parameters which have been negotiated
between polity and economic structures over time. Readerships, new
technologies, politicians, journalists themselves all are capable of sig-
nificantly altering the discourse of newspapers and their language has
had to accommodate aspects of all of them. At particular junctures in
the history of the newspaper, there have been moments of discursive
realignment, by which we mean in Foucault’s terms, when there are
changes in what newspapers as an institution can say and what they are
prevented from saying, implicitly or explicitly, if they wish to maintain
their authority and control over issues of knowledge and power: issues
which have always been fundamental to their credibility. This credibi-
lity is always bound up with how they communicate to socially situated
readers both across time, maintaining their identity, and within spe-
cific historical moments, or diachronically and synchronically in de
Saussure’s terms. These junctures can often shift the emphasis from
language to the area of ethics or professionalism but the debate remains
one predominantly about language and indeed about the generic range
of language which can potentially claim the communicative space of
the newspaper. This book is a brief account of some of the sociolinguis-
tic shifts in that set of relationships.

Introduction

There had already been a range of outlets for the dissemination of
topical information before the introduction of printing to Western
Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century, but these had most often
involved a great deal of centralized control – political or ecclesiastical
– and took the form of proclamations, sacred manuscripts, edicts or
formal announcements of state decisions. To these we can add the
informal commentary and dissemination of the ballad. The former
depended on handwritten manuscripts, the latter on traditions of oral
transmission. As commodity capital established itself in the Early
Modern period, possession of extensive information about events in the
contemporary world was as much a matter of social status as it was of
political or economic survival (Briggs and Burke, 2002) and conse-
quently, printing enabled an increased flow of both official and
unofficial news in various forms. Both began a loosening up of the
social networks of communication by increasing the number and range
of voices in circulation. Newsletter writers had started to develop a
structured form of information distribution following on from the kind
perfected by the Fuggers, a powerful banking family in Central Europe
in the mid-fifteenth century, who employed a chain of well-placed
informants to provide them with the latest news pertaining to their
business and political interests from around their trading areas of
Western Europe and the Middle East. The application of the new tech-
nology of printing to the dissemination of news not only inverted social
hierarchies of control over communication by allowing the commercial
consideration of the printers to challenge the political considerations of
ruling elites, but it also began a process of blending the careful textual
construction of the newsletter scribes with the popular appeal which
had characterized oral literature. The language of printed news material,
even before the advent of formal periodical newsbooks and newspapers,
was involved in a dialogic exchange with non-literate culture; printed
works being disseminated by word of mouth, transforming the culture
of the ‘illiterate’, and the oral modes of communication shaping the
structure of printed works (Watt, 1991; Ong, 1982). This meant that

Society writes back

The Language of Newspapers

printed news could gradually begin to combine both social and
aesthetic aspects in its presentation, which would hold out the promise
of a widening audience and an attractive potential for profit for those
able to harness this twin appeal. The aesthetic attraction of news as an
activity with its own integrity has also been noted:

News was supposed to be consumed not only because it enabled
social exchange, or facilitated rational behaviour, but as an end in
itself. (Raymond, 1996: 2)

The social challenge of news

The regular circulation of news in printed form implied, through its
style and address, that it was intended for an audience that was signifi-
cantly wider than traditional social and religious elites. This enhances
the relevance to this account of contemporary analysts’ views of lan-
guage as a ‘social semiotic’ (Halliday, 1978) since the communicative
form of printed news told the audience not only about the state of the
world in provisional form but also about their status as recipients of
this news. In addition, it allowed a dawning realization of the implica-
tions of the changing social composition of a world which was structured
increasingly by an understanding of current affairs which could be
gleaned on a regular basis for a modest financial outlay. What energized
this social form of communication still more was the fact that it could
be sold as a commodity, for profit, so that broadening the base of news
consumers, through style and popular appeal, meant printers making
more money.

The original news genre was the narrative report and it developed

within a specific set of socio-historical processes. News, as Sommerville
(1996) has indicated, formed part of a radical break in the epistemology
of Western Europe and it acted as a challenge to customary political
restrictions on the flow of information at the same time as its language
experimented with styles which could appeal to a wider social market.
Thus, from the first, printed news was generically associated with
social expectations (Swales, 1990) which placed printed news within a
political framework which ensured that the advent of printed news was
accompanied both by sets of restrictions as well as accommodations
with the structures of political control (Siebert, 1965) which allowed
the Tudor monarchs to work within their own political and religious
desiderata:

Tudor monarchs, regardless of their religious allegiances, recog-
nized the printed word’s potential power to achieve their religious,
political, and cultural ends. In this respect they employed their

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prerogative to grant both authority and economic benefits to the
printers. (Clegg, 1997: 24)

Even a publishing industry under the strict control imposed by the
Tudors was problematic for the state, for often it was the scurrilous, the
dangerous, the unlicensed information which the public was most
eager to read. Topical versions of political affairs and religious tracts
found themselves in company with more sensational fare such as
reports of local fires and murders, often in the form of ballads. Published
material had, prior to printing, drawn upon much longer cultural and
political narratives which relied upon the authority of the Church
and the related divine power of the monarch whereas the mechanical
reproduction of printed news created a language which could shape
discussions of contemporary political and social affairs:

Over the course of the seventeenth century, the news had also
generated an extended present of duration, not instant. Or, to put it
another way, it had carved out a ‘detemporalized zone’ between
past and future, a zone that offered a space for the discussion of
current events . . . (Woolf, 2001: 109)

Bourdieu (1998) has written of the importance of understanding the
range of social and political networks which culminate in what he has
called the ‘journalistic field’. In the early decades of periodical printed
news, the social and political expectations of a particular class of news
reader broadened out in ways which began to shift the existing parame-
ters of social experience and the literate subject’s ‘habitus’ became
diversified to encompass a novel range of structural approaches to the
representation of the contemporary world. This discourse of early
printed news had to fit pragmatically within dominant political and eco-
nomic models yet was able to shift and test the boundaries of what was
permitted as the demands and expectations of its consumers changed.

The prehistory of newspapers

Caxton had introduced his Westminster Press in 1476 and by the early
sixteenth century, news pamphlets were first appearing. The earliest
example in English is the 1513 account of the Battle of Flodden; her-
after ensue the trewe encounter or batayle lately done between Englande
and Scotlande. This outlined the progress of the English king and his
army to the north, the strategies of battle, impressions of the conduct of
the rival armies and the eventual outcome, including casualties and a
list of knighthoods awarded to the English military leaders. It also con-
tains a woodcut illustrating preparations for the battle. This news was

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also distributed simultaneously in ballad form under the title of
‘A Ballad of the Scottyshe Kynge’.

Printed accounts of the past and present achievements of the Kings of

England were often government publications and were presented in for-
mal language to an audience presumed passive to the influence of the
information. There was no assumption made in the text that these com-
munications were a source of debate or invited involvement of any sort
by the populace. They were strictly for information only. A good exam-
ple is William Rastell’s 420 page account of the reign of Henry VII,
published under the title Fabyans Chronycle in 1533: ‘newly printed
with the cronycle, actes, and dedes done in the time of the most excel-
lent prynce kynge Henry the vii . . .’

It was not until the accession of Henry VIII that the social and politi-

cal impact of print was beginning to be appreciated as its use spread
from arts and literature to the political and religious controversies of the
day. Henry VIII’s reforms were widely publicized during the Reforma-
tion in the form of news pamphlets printed by those eager to make a
profit out of it. Although the 1534 Act of Supremacy meant that the
monarch had total control of the state, church and naturally printing, in
the first half of the sixteenth century, the English gentry was coming to
realize that, in the Europe of the Renaissance, education was becoming
essential to maintain traditional patterns of power and the grammar
schools, founded for the purpose of educating their sons, were able to
use the printed material provided by the expanding printing industry.
At the same time, the vernacular-based teachings of the Reformation
saw the rapid rise of a literate clergy and congregations more inclined to
turn to English translations of sacred texts. In this way the ground was
prepared for a loosened relationship between older traditions of author-
ity and the printed word (Levy, 11–13). However, when opinion on
political conjecture was printed, it could bring the full power of the state
down on the author. In 1579, John Stubbe wrote a significant 44 page
pamphlet in reaction to speculation that Elizabeth had offered herself in
marriage to the duc d’Anjou, the brother of the King of France, Henry III,
in order to delay the annexation of the Netherlands by Spain:

The Discourie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England is like to be
swallowed by another French marriage; if the Lord forbid not the
banes, by letting her Maiestie see the sin and punishment thereof.

The pamphlet presumed to alert readers to the dangers to the monarch and
her country in this course of action, concluding in the following terms:

. . . we cannot chuse but . . . conclude that thys French marriage, is
the straightest line that can be drawn fro Rome to the utter ruine of

Society Writes Back

our church: & the very rightest perpendicular downfall that can be
imagined fro the point France to our English state . . .

Stubb was tried and imprisoned but despite the Queen’s desire that he
should be executed for this ‘lewde and seditious book’ his punishment
was reduced to having his right hand severed.

War provided an immediate best-selling topic for publication. It could

be embroidered by dramatizing the very process of newsgathering itself
which could be particularly striking at a time when the logistics of com-
mercial information gathering and publication were a communicative
novelty. News from Antwerp (1580) added a frisson of espionage and
treachery by claiming that the letters drawn upon for its account had
been intercepted from the hands of spies and that they proved the
impossibility of negotiating a lasting peace with a treacherous Spain:

A speciall view of the present affayres of the lowe Countreyes:
Revealed and brought to light, by sundrie late intercepted Letters, of
certain vizarded and counterfeit Countrymen of the same Countreys.

England’s involvement in the war against Philip II first stimulated
a regular English interest in printed news which materialized in a
marked increase in the numbers of news pamphlets in the 1590s (Voss,
2001). Their primary purpose was propaganda in the service of building
a national consensus around the heroism of the English forces overseas.
In addition, it was a good way for the authorities to set the record straight,
as rumour and disinformation circulated quite freely among court as
well as around the country. The acquisition of colonies and the rise of
England as a maritime power after the victory over the Spanish Armada
in 1588 led to an increase in commodity wealth in England and a corre-
sponding rise of a commercial class to rival the landed aristocracy. So it
is no surprise that the most famous intelligence gatherer of this era, John
Chamberlain, began his work in 1588 as news became increasingly
traded as a commodity in lubrication of other commodities.

John Wolfe, a printer and publisher, was recruited by Lord Burghley,

the Principal Minister of the Queen to distribute translations of Protes-
tant propaganda to Catholic countries such as France and Italy. He also
developed the first corantos translated into English and experimented
with the compilation of news pamphlets in a series but as yet one lack-
ing in regularity of publication. Credible Reportes from France, and
Flanders. In the moneth of May. 1590 gives an illustration of the style
of these early narrative reports:

A weeke since, came from Diepe a certaine Bark the which arrived
at Plymouth which reported, that the governor of Diepe, was come
to Diep after the battaile sicke of an ague, and that during his

The Language of Newspapers

sicknes, the Papistes murmured, and woulde not suffer the exercise
of Religion . . . The Governour of Renes hath cuased one friar to be
hanged, and half a dosen of the Chiefest of the Citty, who did call
the King hereticke.

In contrast, there was still no appetite among the political elite for any
wider dissemination of parliamentary news. For instance, Siebert
records that in 1589 the discussion of Parliamentary matters among out-
siders prompted the Speaker to reprimand the members of the House:

that Speeches used in this House by the Members of the same be not
any of them made or used as Table-talk, or in any wise delivered in
notes of writing to any person or persons whatsoever not being
Members of this House. (Siebert, 1965: 103)

However, an arresting example of the new range of language afforded
to political debate in print is provided by the appearance between
October 1588 and September 1589 of the Martin Marprelate tracts.
Evading government press controls and the vested interests of the print-
ing establishment, a secret movable printing press was deployed to
disseminate seven satirical tracts by radical, puritan reformers against
the authority of church and state. They were used to spread radical,
religious opinion as well as to entertain in satirical fashion and drew in
a larger readership for these discussions through their use of a popular
polemic. The first tract, an epistle To the right puissant and terrible
Priests, my clergie masters of the Confention house was published in
1588 and itemizes the sins of its targets among the church hierarchy:

And take heed brethren of your reverend and learned brother
Martin Marprelate. For he meaneth in these reasons following I can
tell you, to prove that you ought not to be maintained by the author-
itie of the Magistrate in any Christian commonwealth: Martin is a
shrewd fellow, and reasoneth thus. Those that are pettie popes and
pettie Antichrists, ought not to be maintained in any Christian com-
monwealth. But every Lord Bishop in England are pettie popes and
pettie Antichrists . . . our Prelates usurp their authoritie
. . . Helpe the poore people to the meanes of their salvation, that
perish in their ignorance: make restitution unto your tenants and
such as from whome you have wrongfully extorted anything: usurpe
no longer, the authoritie of making of ministers and excommunica-
tion: Let poore men be no more molested in your ungodly courts . . .
Take no more bribes . . . All in a word, become good Christians.

The Marprelate attacks on clerics were highly personalized and pro-
vided a foretaste of how similar invective could be put to political
purposes in the English Civil War. In fact, by naming the bishops and
their victims, the author lends considerable credibility to his claims to

Society Writes Back

dealing with ‘matters of fact’ (Clegg, 1997: 189) as part of a cultural shift
towards the generic expectations of news as commentary and polemic
on contemporary affairs. Furthermore, it confirmed the potential of
printed material to push forward demands for an increased pace of reli-
gious reform which aligned with the views of many within the
Puritan-dominated printing community. Moreover, in their combina-
tion of insolence towards authority and the claims they made to be
based in corroborated fact, the tracts also demonstrated the potential
for print to challenge the basis for social consensus. It was the very lan-
guage of these tracts and not just their argumentative and oppositional
stance which constituted such a dynamic innovation:

By attacking the bishops in language hitherto used only for the per-
sonal, Martin Marprelate decoupled the decorum of language from
the decorum of subject. (Levy, 1999: 33)

Newsletter writers: A new class of reader

The late sixteenth century saw an increase in the London trade in news
pamphlets dealing in the relatively uncontentious; sensationalist news
of murders, witchcraft and strange apparitions. The Court, the Inns of
Law, and the lanes around St Paul’s became in Elizabethan times
a network of gossip and here news was disseminated through the means
of the newsletter. The newsletters offered a varied diet, including poli-
tical and social news of the court but also details of trials and a
smattering of strange happenings and gossip from home and abroad.
They were also more expensive and therefore more restricted in distri-
bution than the printed newsbooks which followed. In comparison
with printed newsbooks, they were a more intimate medium and less
likely to be read aloud to groups or to be sold on second-hand at a
reduced price like the newsbooks. Newsletters came to combine both
handwritten and printed material. They could include among other
things: ‘corantos, proclamations, copies of letters, death notices, verses,
extracts from banned books, pamphlets and foreign newspapers . . .’
(Atherton, 1999: 52–53). The newsletters were important not only for
the information they contained but in the way their compilers were
able to use them to establish and structure the network of contacts they
had built up in the pursuit of their trade. These networks would come
to provide the information sources for more regular printed publica-
tions. ‘Intelligencers’ gathered information from their sources around
the nodes of power in London, much of which was gathered from
personal conversations or reports of such conversations and distributed
it on a regular basis in the form of letters to their powerful patrons.
What had started as a personalized correspondence became a professional

The Language of Newspapers

service which could provide a lucrative living for somebody with a
network of informants, credibility among a wide range of clients wealthy
enough to invest in such a bespoke service and the ability to synthesize
the information in an accessible style within a short period of time. The
style of the letters was by necessity deferential as they were written to
high ranking public figures by more lowly informants. This implied
that they did not presume to guide the reader by suggestions of opinion
or emphasis. These letters were copied on behalf of the information
gatherers by scriveners. These semi-professional newswriters had a
reputation for accurate reporting to uphold in order to maintain the
credibility of their sources and the reliability of their work and to
distance their material from the embroidery to be found in the circula-
tion of popular news in the ballad form.

The common perception among critics, however, was that news was

untrustworthy, prone to exaggeration and that its dependence on
novelty for its profits even provided a rationalization for deliberate
invention and deceit. Woolf explains that the distrust of the new genre
of printed news emanated from problems in verifying what it claimed
and the general lack of authority that surrounded anything other than
texts which were supported by the authority of tradition (2001: 101).
In fact, there was much talk and writing of the spread of news in medi-
cal terms as if it was a disease or an ‘itch’ in the seventeenth century
(Atherton, 1999). There was also a class perspective in these criticisms
of printed news since those from elite circles were able to read and
contribute to manuscript newsletters of their own and as they knew
their sources, more often than not, they were therefore not dependent
on the widely circulated commodity news intended for those lower
down the social scale:

. . . the news had spread to the vulgar. Matters of state, once the
arcana imperii restricted to those fitted by birth and education to a
wise understanding of their intricacies, had become the common
discourse of the masses. (Atherton, 1999: 56)

In 1620 Ben Jonson wrote a court entertainment called News from the
New World which mocked the new craze for information from very
much the perspective that it breached the communicative privileges of
the nobility. Later, in 1626, he presented these ideas in the form of a
play, The Staple of News, which depicted with, ‘dripping scorn,
a syndicate of newsmongers bent on achieving a monopoly over the
distribution of fresh intelligence’ (Sherman, 2001: 24). In the opening
act, a dialogue outlines an awareness that news was tailored to suit the
needs of its commercial audience with all the implications he claims
this held for reliability. ‘News by the alphabet’ is subdivided into

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‘authentical’ and ‘apocryphal’, ‘news of doubtful credit’, ‘news of the
season’, ‘Protestant news’, ‘pontifical news’ and one character protests:

Why, methinks, sir, if the honest common people
Will be abused, why should not they have their pleasure
In the believing lies are made for them . . . (Cunningham, 1816:
285–286)

Richard Brathwaite in his Whimzies: Or a New Cast of Characters (1631)
provides an early sceptical set of observations on how news writers
used their language to lure their readers into the cycle of periodicity
and to ‘delude the vulgar’ (Brathwaite: 21). The corano-coiner is described
in the same document as the balladeer and the almanac-maker, demon-
strating the simultaneity of many concerns around the dissemination of
topical information in print. Of the coranto-coiner he writes,

He retaines some militarie words of art, which hee shootes at ran-
dome: no matter where they hit, they cannot wound any. He ever
leaves some passages doubtfull, as if they were some more intimate
secrecies of State, clozing his sentence abruptly – With heerafter
you shall heare more. Which words, I conceive, hee onely useth as
baites, to make the appetite of the Reader more eager for the next
week’s pursuit for a more satisfying labour. Some generall-erring
relations he picks up, as Crummes or fragments, from a frequented
Ordinario: Of which shreads he shapes a Cote to fit any credulous
foole that will weare it. (Brathwaite, 1631: 16)

Corantos: Early commercialization of news

The outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1620 provided the political
trigger for the emergence of periodical news in England. There were
several different levels of national interest in the process of the war.
James’ daughter Princess Elizabeth had married Frederick, Elector of
the Palatinate who had subsequently accepted the crown of Bohemia
against the wishes of the Holy Roman Emperor. Many wanted an inter-
vention on behalf of the Protestant forces because there were rising
fears about the future of reformed religion in England. English merce-
naries and money were also involved in the growing conflict, adding
still more newsworthiness to events. To pander to these various inter-
ests and the reasonable desire of printers to make money out of the
public’s curiosity, in 1621 the government allowed the printing of cor-
antos in English in London. At first they appeared irregularly but their
printers soon realized that numbering promoted expectation and recall
by readers which would boost regular habits of readership and early
editors such as Thomas Gainsford, from 1622, were employed to
provide more flowing narratives and continuities between editions.

The Language of Newspapers

The corantos generally avoided controversial aspects of domestic
politics in case their printers lost their lucrative licenses or suffered
more draconian prosecution. Nevertheless, material printed in the
United Provinces or the German states and then imported, provided
enough controversial material to keep the corantos interesting for
readers. Material which was too controversial, such as accounts of
parliamentary discussions, could always be included as ‘separates’
within newsletters. It was the ‘separate’, for instance, which provided
the first printed account of the proceedings of Parliament in 1628.
However, the level of censorship does not explain by itself the lack of
home news. In general terms, news from home was less interesting
because it was more generally available through personal contacts and
less of an attractive and exotic commodity. In addition, foreign news
was implicitly critical of James I’s foreign policy by its very existence
(Baron, 2001: 44) and had the added attraction for publishers, that such
news tended, especially the religious variety from Europe, to be more
sensational and gruesome – even with more scope for embroidery.
There was more evidence in the reports from foreign wars that the great
apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil was being enacted
which many believed was an indicator of the imminence of Christ’s
return to earth and judgement day.

Here we have several brief examples from issue 14 of The Affaires

and Generall Businesse of Europe more particularly (24 February 1624).
The sequencing was already an indicator of an important innovation of
these periodicals. Dating and sequencing structured their publication
in the expectation that more would follow on particular topics and
identifiable stories.

Severall Ambassadors at Rome
The King of Congo in Aethiopia hath sent to Rome for Priests to
be instructed in true Religion; for they are willing to forsake their
Idols.

This was continued as a narrative strand in issue number 16, which
announced:

The sending of Friers from the Pope to Congos, King in Aethiopia.

There are early experiments in this same issue with headlines to indi-
cate stories covered, a running order and an indication of the weaving
of popular and political even at this early stage.

Two Wonderful and Lamentable accidents herein related; the
one shewing the great losse and fearfull shipwracke caused by
the last tempest, with the fight betweene those Dunkerkers and the

Society Writes Back

Hollanders, which hath so long continued in our coast in the
Downes, of whom some escaped, some were sunke, the rest staid.
The other of a maiden who through her extreme pride was
personally deceived by the Devill, who afterwards ended her life
most miserably. (October 11)

In the same issue, great store is set in the specific approach to the reader;
it starts, ‘Gentle Reader’ and by frequent mentions of ‘we’, emphasizing
the idea that the coranto could be a communal activity involving, just
as newsletters, communication among a network of committed partici-
pants. The explicit process of weaving letters received into an informed
commentary on foreign, political and military affairs in an early exam-
ple of editorial work informs an assumed readership of the political
contexts of information just as the more personalized newsletters would
have done.

From Venice the tenth of February
The Letters from Venice are of divers sorts; for they intreat
of sundry matters; but the principal abstracts may be thus set
down . . .’
The last letter we have received from Venice saies plainly, that
there is great preparation made in Spaine, both for men, money, and
all warlike provision, & either to prevent Hollanders for their incur-
sions into the West Indies, or to set upon them in their own countries
upon any advantage . . .

In another early coranto, there is an appeal to readers to believe in the
fastidiousness of the news writer who distances himself from the com-
munication style of the almanac writers and even suggests the need for
readers to decide for themselves on the reliability of various accounts
where they are in contradiction, without overt authorial or editorial
intervention. We see here claims to an extremely liberal trust in the
good sense of the reader to distinguish truthful information; claims
which take their lead from the service provided by the newsletter writ-
ers to their social and political superiors in transmitting information to
them together with assurances of minimal editorial interference:

. . . For I translate onely the Newes verbatim out of the Tongues
or Languages in which they are written, and having no skill in
Prognostication, leave therefore the judgement to the Reader, & that
especially when there are tidings which contradict one another.
(Mercurius Britannicus, No. 28, 28 June 1625)

By 1632 the power of the state was wielded to suppress all corantos and
newsbooks. As a consequence, there was then a flood of news ballads
since there was an obvious market for news and a pool of printers
willing to take the risk of printing it. Gathering momentum was also, in

The Language of Newspapers

Siebert’s resonant phrase: ‘the low rumble of the demand of the people
to see, hear and to know . . .’ (Siebert, 1965: 87).

Parliamentary reporting: Informing the reader

The great political shift which allowed for an unprecedented experi-
mentation with the form and content of news production in print
came as a consequence of the summoning of the Long Parliament on
3 November 1640. At first, members of Parliament sought to have their
speeches, or their opinions, published and circulated by sympathetic
printers but textually they retained the general attributes of elite com-
munication (Mendle, 2001: 59). However, as the crisis deepened into
rebellion and due to the civil war from the early 1640s onwards, there
was a radical reorientation of interest in current affairs and the discus-
sion of ideas in the midst of which the publication of contemporary
debate on politics in newsbooks came to represent the interests of
popular politics against authoritarianism (Raymond, 1996: 82). The
confusion of conflicting accounts drew in readers wanting to get closer
to an accurate assessment of the positions and claims of both sides.
In this volatile climate, the production of domestic news multiplied.
From the 1640s, newsbooks claimed exact dates for their news and con-
tained domestic news and unchanging titles, which gave them a greater
sense of continuity. The distribution networks which had been built by
the corantos and newsletters meant that there was a ready market and
supply infrastructure for the innovation of the newsbook. The first pub-
lication of the proceedings of both Houses of Parliament was the Heads
of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament from the 22 November
to the 29 in 1641. This was the first recorded English newsbook. It con-
sisted of eight pages and included both domestic and foreign news
although, in keeping with the times, it was predominantly a retelling
of events and discussions in Parliament. It was ordered into chronolog-
ical headings and was the composite work of a writer, an editor and a
publisher. It attempted to demonstrate a high level of accuracy and
impartiality:

Monday in the House of Commons they received letters from
Ireland, intimating that theire troubles are so great, that they have
scarce time eyther day or night to write. That the Rebells doe much
increase and presse hard toward Dublin, which putteth the Kingdom
into great feare being scarce able to resist them. That they want
mony to pay their Souldiers already entertained.
That sending to the Rebels to demande the cause of theire taking
up of Armes, they return a remonstrance that is to maintaine the
Kinges prerogative and the freedome of Concience, in the exercising

Society Writes Back

of religion, which if they may have confermed by Acte of Parlia-
ment they will lay down theire Armes, and make restitution for the
harmes done by them.

It was with the production of the newsbooks that we begin to see the
forensic scrutinizing of the proceedings of Parliament ushering in a
‘symbolic leap in attitudes towards the polity’ (Raymond, 1996: 122)
and the first attempts to consolidate that scrutiny through putting it
into a widely accessible and regularly available public form of language
as a contribution to a newly ‘energized politics’ which indicated the
extent to which these newsbooks had had broken through the former
limits of political experience (Zagorin, 1969: 206). The newsbooks were
characterized by being relatively inexpensive, weekly (periodic) and by
containing reports of parliamentary proceedings and debate. Initially,
they eschewed the pamphlet style of vicious prose or the satirical
approach of the ballad. By way of contrast, they attempted to capture
the spoken nature of debate in as authentic an account as possible to
distinguish their content as news. Public dissemination of regular
reports on the contemporary world as well as opinion on those events
and the political personalities involved, constituted in itself a radical
break with traditions of language use and it was to provide the begin-
nings of a reconfigured relationship between public communication
and social and political worlds. The distinguishing features of this lan-
guage, conceptually speaking, were a concentration on the contemporary
and the strong sense of a social audience. This latter point was pro-
foundly political as it challenged previously established hierarchies of
communication even if the information was not strictly speaking about
politics or if it tried to be as even-handed as possible when dealing with
political issues.

As political tensions increased, so too did the numbers of newsbooks

and consequently plagiarism between competing titles as all attempted
to provide the latest and most complete news for their readers. The
Perfect Diurnall was launched on 3 July 1643 with a strategy of rational,
evidence-based appeal to its readers as equals:

. . . You may henceforth expect from this relator to be informed
onely of such things as are of credit, and of some part of the pro-
ceedings of one or both houses of Parliament fit to be divulged, or
such other news as shall be certified by Letters from the Army, and
other parts from persons of speciall trust . . .

The early Perfect Diurnall of Samuel Pecke used a form of shorthand,
gave examples of extracts, cross-checked its sources and provided
calls to the readers as ‘people’ as participants in the political processes,
all in an attempt to create as persuasive a case as possible for its own

The Language of Newspapers

legitimacy and reliability. It boasted a reputation as a ‘competent record
of public events’ (Frank, 1961: 43) for the very good reason that:

A reputation for truthfulness and a concern to avoid antagonizing
those in power continued to be the route to success among all
editors and publishers who did not conspicuously ally themselves
with a partisan group; and Pecke, having sampled jail, never again
fell off the political tightrope. (Frank, 43)

The newsbooks also developed in terms of their visual presentation.
On 3 January 1643 in the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer there were
short phrases indicating the content of reports printed inside. This fore-
runner of the headline was soon widely copied. More publications sought
to trade on claims for the exactitude of their reporting with an increasing
number of titles reflecting this in their claims to be a True Diurnall, an
account of Diurnall Occurrences or a True and Exact Relation. This was
not to last for long. Yet despite these early good intentions, their detrac-
tors still found them to be ‘false and scandalous’ and even these attempts
at impartiality were perceived by the existing hierarchy to be an affront
to the monarch’s presumed monopoly on political leadership.

Ironically, the power and reach of the newsbooks grew still further as

their reputation for fairness and balance declined. The audience clearly
approved of partisanship which helps to explain the continuities
between newsletters and the later newsbooks and mercuries in contrib-
uting to the polarization which generated a confrontational view of the
world of politics (Cust, 1986: 87). The newsbooks became more opini-
ated and therefore more individuated, moving rapidly from the sober
reporting of 1641 to the battles of the mercuries from 1643. They sought
out and talked to the readers in a confident voice with growing consist-
ency of opinion and increasingly addressed them as explicitly colluding
in the creation of partisan political positions. Frank has estimated that
by the first week of 1644 there were a dozen competing papers provid-
ing half the literate males in metropolitan London with a regular supply
of news, making them an important force in moulding public opinion
(Frank: 57). While most were targeted at metropolitan readers, there
were a few short-run papers which sought to exploit the taste for news
among specific rural communities. There was an even more obvious
political variety of viewpoint with Royalist, Parliamentarian, Presbyte-
rian and Independent papers all identifiable.

The Mercuries: Polemical positions

Mercurius Aulicus (Oxford) was started on 8 January 1643 to
counter the London newsbooks and what the Royalists considered

Society Writes Back

parliamentary propaganda despite the newsbooks’ early attempts at
even-handedness. It was produced first by Heylin and then more
emphatically by Sir John Berkenhead with much editorial commentary
and counteraccusations of inaccuracies in its rivals’ reporting. By 1648,
in an edition ‘printed in the weeke, in which the Saints looke bleake’
(7 August), it included a poetic editorial to fit with the apocalyptic
mood:

. . . Loe now surviving Aulicus appears,
(Like stormbred Orion, from the angry skie)
Possessing Traytours with immortall fears,
Thundered from Joves supremast Majesty:
Heavens have decreed this, and therefore know,
You must adjourne from Earth to sit below
In darkest dungeon of the Stygian pit,
To vote and order what the Fiends think fit.
There, Flames shall be your guard, and Hell your Court,
Where you shall act to make Grand Pluto sport.

And between pages 3 and 7 of this edition from 1648 we can read a fine
example of the sort of personal invective hurled at the parliamentary
politicians:

The State Black-smiths, and forgers of the cause have been almost
eight years hammering out a pretty Antimonarchical Idoll, and now
(like Prometheus) they endeavour to give it life, though it endanger
their own . . . O for ever may the name of this Parliament be a bull-
beare and hob-gobling to fright and amaze children . . . Fathers of
falsehood, Legions of lyes . . . dying their tongues in bloodred
blasphemy . . . black Tom, Sir gouty-foot Thomas.

One of the most notable of the mercury writers of the period was
Marchamont Nedham who demonstrated a remarkable pragmatism
in shifting between Parliamentarian and Royalist publications and
back while managing to maintain an ability to articulate, through his
network of contacts, a style of news cut to suit the tastes and opinions
of different political constituencies. He started his career with the
co-editorship from 1643 of Mercurius Britanicus: Communicating the
Affaires of Great Britaine: for the Better Information of the People. His
style contributed much to the development of an opinionated, colour-
ful and vitriolic journalism of political engagement including
personalized invective, here directed at Birkenhead:

Thou mathematical liar . . . I tell thee thou art a knowne notorious
forger: and though I will not say thou art (in thine own language,
the sonne of an Egyptian whore), yet all the world knows thou art
an underling pimpe to the whore of Babylon, and thy conscience an

The Language of Newspapers

arrant prostitute for base ends. (Mercurius Britanicus, 27 January to
3 February 1645)

Nedham can be seen in the following, playfully exploiting the range of
opinion on the whereabouts of the King, as if weighing them up from
the perspective of the conscientious editor while deploying the various
explanations as a satirical device before going on to indulge in what
would become a staple of more modern popular journalism, the offer of
a reward for information provided:

Where is King Charles? What is become of him? The strange
variety of opinions leaves nothing certain: for some say, when he
saw the Storm coming after him as far as Bridgwater, he ran away
to his dearly beloved in Ireland; yes, they say he ran away out of
his own Kingdome very Majestically: Others will have him erect-
ing a new monarchy in the Isle of Anglesey: A third sort there
are which say he hath hid himselfe. I will not now determine the
matter, because there is such a deal of uncertainty; and therefore
(for the satisfaction of my Countrymen) it were best to send Hue
and Cry after him.
If any man can bring any tale or tiding of a willfull King, which
hath gone astray these foure yeares from his Parliament, with a
guilty conscience, bloody Hands, a Heart full of broken Vowes and
Protestations . . . give notice to Britanicus, and you shall be well
paid for your paines. So God save the Parliament. (Mercurius
Britanicus, No. 92, 28 July to 4 August 1645)

By 1650, Nedham had started to edit the licensed Mercurius Politicus
and continued as an important contributor to the development of poli-
tical journalism in his pioneering of the editorial opinion piece and his
facility for publicizing republican ideas in a language and rhetoric
which combined political sophistication with an ear for a vernacular
appeal to a broad readership. This was often couched in remarkably
prescient historical contextualizations of topical issues which aimed at
establishing the national interest in republican terms:

The Majesty of England, (though now diffused in the hands of
many) is the same as it was, when in the hands of one; and is indeed
much more majestick now, than it hath been for many hundred
years past . . . free from the check of any single Tyrant . . .
Above all, it concerns such a Commonwealth as ours to beware of
any the most petit insinuations (either at home or abroad) that may
open the least Cranie to let in so much as a little finger of a banisht
Tyrant, or Tyrannick Family; for, admit that, and then the whole
Body follows, and what not? Revenge is reckoned inter Arcana
Imperii, one of the speciall mysteries in the Cabinet-Counsels of

Society Writes Back

Royalty, and prized as the prime Jewell of a Crown . . . (Mercurius
Politicus, No. 39, 27 February to 6 March 1651)

In effect, the period 1640–1660 is an extended experiment in the
politics of the press under conditions which swing from almost abso-
lute freedom to almost absolute control. Despite this, however, as with
Milton in his famous Areopagitica (1644) most polemicists really only
wanted freedom for those whose opinions concurred with their own.
For the philosophical stirrings of a genuine freedom of the press we
must turn to the Levellers. In 1648, The Moderate was launched as a
forum for Leveller discussion and debate. Its author, Mabbott, used a
language of straightforward appeal to engage readers in radical ideas
about democratic participation and provide an alternative narrative on
the chaos of contemporary military and political events which provides
a striking illustration that the development of the language of the news
was a struggle between oppositional forces. Frank argues that it used
the slogan ‘“Salus populi suprema lex” as a leftist battle-cry . . .’ (Frank,
1961: 156) with their petition to parliament of 11 September 1648 as
possibly the high point of its public polemic.

Another significant periodical with an ability to fashion compelling

explanations from the perspective of a popular position was Dilling-
ham’s Moderate Intelligencer again stressing the importance of ‘plain
English’ to political debate:

Governments (to lay aside the terms of Monarchy, Aristocracie, and
Democracie, as words too hard for most) are either when the people
. . . choose or appoint one supream magistrate wrest not the Law to
their hurt, nor that any foreign power invade, oppresse, or subject
them, and then he is qualified with power (yet bounded) and with
revenue because chief, & in this way the highest is no more of God
then the lowest (for what ever God enjoyns as morall, is binding to
all reasonable creatures) nor freer from questioning, some say: This
way of a King, which English word, as they that understand the
Saxon language say, signifies no more but cunning: A cunning or
wise man is set over the people by their consent, because cunning,
to see to their preservation.
The second is when the King is set aside, and the government by
Lords and Commons, to speake plain English, hath the same trust
the King had, which hath beene, as to action divers years past, and
this seems to claim its place if an alteration.
The third is to have the government of Commons onely, which,
de facto, it’s now coming unto, as appears by the ensuing Votes,
which past in the House of Commons. (Moderate Intelligencer,
No. 199, 4 January to 11 January 1649)

The Language of Newspapers

Generic variations

Given that the events of the Civil War so subverted ordinary people’s
beliefs and expectations of the natural and God-given political order, it
is not surprising that they flocked to read accounts of a world turned
upside down to help them find at least confirmation in these accounts
that the world had gone mad. Life was beyond the rational control of
men. Omens, monsters, portents, prognostications, storms, leap out of
the almanac and into contemporary news heralded by such titles as:
Strange and Wonderful Relation, True Relation, Strange News, A Sign
from Heaven, Fearful News, News from the Dead. These stories of the
strange and the supernatural often had moral overtones and reinforced
notions of social right and wrong for their audiences (Friedman, 1993:
29). In 1647, The World Turned Upside Down, or, A Brief Description
of the Ridiculous Fashions of These Distracted Times captured the
feelings of many in apocalyptic verse commentary:

Nay, England’s face and language is estranged,
That all is Metamorphis’d chop’d and chang’d.
For like as on the Poles of the World is whorl’d

So is this Land the Bedlam of the World. (Friedman: 38)

The newsbooks were responding to changing cultural and political
circumstances in the country and in their turn adapting themselves to
best exploit the situation and the tastes of their readers. Most news-
books came to include some human-interest items, ranging from the
weird and the wonderful to the pathos of a country torn apart by civil
war. In the newsbooks there was an experimentation with form and
genre. John Crouch provided a ribald variant on the news of the day in
his Man in the Moon from 1649 and his Mercurius Fumiogus (1654).
The generic variety of many of the newsbooks allowed satirical content
the foreground while the content could range from reporting in straight
prose, to dialogue and ballad poems.

Pamphlet plays, according to Wiseman (1999) present themselves to

their readers as both news and politics, indicating an early problem in
distinguishing news from opinion and illustrating the variety and
blending of hybrid styles in the production of the print culture of
England from a very early stage. He claims they provided, ‘. . . a highly
hybridized and flexible new type of pamphlet, sitting at the borders of
print and oral culture, political theory and polemic, plays and news’
(Wiseman, 1999: 69). They were often bound together with newsbooks
to further indicate the mingling of genres. They, like more formal
news categories, addressed their readers as participants in the vibrant
dialogue of political formation as citizens which characterized this

Society Writes Back

period of print culture’s emergence. They had a further effect in
promoting further debate in printed form because of their controversial
and provocative illustration of many of the debates of the day. Dialogue
was a staple of both pamphlet and mercury and was intended as
a contribution to the news by the editors and writers. One of the best-
known writers of these pamphlet plays was Richard Overton. In his
Articles of Treason (1641): ‘. . . a dialogue between Master Papist “a
profest Catholike” and Master Newes “A Temporiser”, the connotations
of news as a “temporiser”, mediating between publication and public
and turning the times to its own advantage, as political opinion and as
commodity, is at the core of the way playlets popularized political debate
and were also genericized as news in the 1640s’ (Wiseman, 1999: 68).

Dialogue was also set down from life by reporters for their readers

deploying increasingly systematized methods of note taking to enhance
accuracy and thereby claims to authenticity. Trials and executions were
noted in an early variety of shorthand, enabling competing accounts to
be compiled which were often contrasted by printers and publishers to
produce a comprehensive version. Writers of news were quite literally
reporting on events and their proximity to the events made their
accounts all the more credible with both readers and printers. The
reproduction of extempore dialogue (Mendle, 2001: 66) matched the
increasing use of the patterns of spoken language in such reports to
make them sound more lifelike as promised in the title of this
pamphlet:

The Arraignment and Acquittal of Sr. Edward Moseley Baronet,
Indicted at the Kings bench for a Rape, upon the body of Mistris
Anne Swinnerton. January 28, 1647. Taken by a Reporter there
present, who heard all the Circumstances thereof, whereof this is a
true Copy. (London 1647)

Another form of generic variation within news dissemination was the
almanac. Almanacs were also an increasingly popular form of interven-
tion in the political debates of the time. In a world in which normal
expectations were being blown away with alarming regularity, people
turned to the almanac and its apocalyptic language as a means of
discovering the truth within events. Censorship had reduced the politi-
cal content of the almanac through Elizabeth’s reign but during the
Civil War it leapt back to prominence as it provided another indicator
of the need of people for some form of explanation and reassurance
about the patterns of the future and the relationship of the present to
that future which the almanac claimed to provide. William Lilly, politi-
cizing astrology, provided predictions from a parliamentary perspective
in The Starry Messenger, or, An Interpretation of Strange Apparitions

The Language of Newspapers

(1644). In keeping with the wide variety of periodical publication,
almanacs were aimed at a general audience and ‘drew ideas and assump-
tions from higher intellectual levels, and presented them in a cheap
and digestible form to a far wider readership’ (Capp, 1979: 283).

Conclusion

By the time of the Commonwealth 1649–1651, it has been observed that
‘Journalism, controlled or uncontrolled, had become a permanent social
and political phenomenon’ (Siebert, 1965: 220). Both the newsbooks
and the mercuries provide us with an initial perspective on how public
communication could be used to both report and simultaneously influ-
ence social and political changes. We have, even at this early stage in
the evolution of the newspaper, a twin-track of experiments with direc-
tion. The language of the more measured journalism of the period, in
fact, contributes to the rational, Enlightenment idea of knowing the
causes of things and having rational opinions on current affairs. The
language of most of the mercuries and popular prints such as the alma-
nac and pamphlet plays of the time illustrate how the supernatural and
the irrational were expressed as a common, popular and everyday
discourse. The development of bourgeois periodical publications was
eventually to erode the irrationality of some of the output of the Civil
War period’s mercuries and broadsides but leave sedimentations of
these trends in the sensationalist and melodramatic traditions of later
popular publications.

Introduction

The language of the periodical press after 1660 developed as a pragmatic
negotiation between the demands of first, readers, who increasingly
perceived themselves as both private individuals and as part of a wider
public; second, printers and advertisers, who were also keen to profit
from wider circulation; third, politicians, who had an ambivalent
attitude to exposure in the news, fearful of criticism yet dependent
upon the popular legitimation which the newspapers could provide
them with.

The point to stress early on in this chapter is that the newspaper

developed unevenly after the Restoration as, in effect, a series of experi-
ments in probing the boundaries of bourgeois good taste in cultural
matters, at the same time as it was testing the tolerance of the political
elite with regard to criticism and commentary on policy. The wide
range of generic variety within these experiments confirms that the
newspaper continued with a diversity of content and appeal in order to
retain its readers. For their part, the elite classes could, in theory, con-
trol newspapers and they were able to demonstrate this at times over
the next 200 years through subsidy, taxation, suppression and prosecu-
tion but they were also keen to be associated with the rhetoric of
freedom which the newspapers increasingly claimed as their own. They
were confident that they could manipulate sections of this new com-
municative form (‘newspaper’ as a term is first recorded in 1670) to
present their own perspectives in as persuasive a manner as possible
and thereby garner popular support while being able to take action
against seditious influences when they saw fit.

Post-restoration newspapers

After the 1662 Printing Act, Lestrange became the Surveyor of the Press
and was granted a monopoly on official news. There was only one
official government newspaper. The Oxford Gazette containing official
announcements but also overseas news was published twice weekly

Putting on a style: The contours
of a public sphere

The Language of Newspapers

between 1665 and 1666 until it moved back to plague-free London and
became the London Gazette. In Lestrange’s hands, the report became
the dominant form of newspaper content once again. In its claims to
authority and its structured formality, the Gazette is very distant in
style and political ambition from the vitriol of the mercuries of the
Civil War years. It is also a precursor of the professionally distanced
style of news writing which would remain the staple of mainstream
newspaper style until the late nineteenth century in England. It was
produced in an entirely different format from the earlier newsbooks.
It was a half sheet with two columns on each side, thus making
more economical use of paper. It provided a combination of court and
foreign news and had a good reputation for these, especially its foreign
service, because of its privileged access to diplomatic sources. Herd has
claimed that

In the history of journalism its significance lies in the fact that its
single leaf form (technically a half sheet in folio), with its pages
divided into two columns, broke away from the news-pamphlet
form to a style that is a recognizable link with the newspaper as we
know it today. (Herd, 1952: 33)

Despite limitation to one official publication, the fact that the govern-
ment felt obliged to produce its own official newspaper at all is a mark
of how news-oriented English society had become in the preceding
twenty years (Woolf, 2001: 98). Lestrange himself articulated this social
solution to a political problem:

Tis the Press that has made ‘um Mad, and the Press must set
‘um Right again. The Distemper is Epidemical; and there’s no way
in the world, but by Printing, to convey the Remedy to the Disease.
(Observator, No. 1, 13 April 1681, quoted in Raymond, 1999: 109)

The London Gazette was however handicapped in the public eye
because of its lack of the domestic political news which continued to be
officially outlawed. To fill this gap, a rival of Lestrange’s, Muddiman,
continued with an influential weekly newsletter which drew upon an
impressive range of social and political contacts who could provide a
wider and less proscribed range of information than the official news-
paper. As a consequence, this kept pressure on the official publication
to maintain a freshness of appeal to its subscribers. There had been
such newsletters from the 1630s in England, particularly following the
introduction of a weekly post in 1637 but the difference, as Sutherland
claims, is that ‘Muddiman brought it to a point of efficiency, both in its
contents and its circulation, that it had never reached before’ (Sutherland,
1986: 6).

Putting on a Style

Profits, partisanship and the public

Between 1678–1682, fears that there were plans afoot to manipulate a
Catholic succession to the throne, known as the ‘Popish Plot’, led to
bitter political in-fighting which produced the parliamentary division
between Whigs and Tories. There was a marked increase in the produc-
tion of newspapers and newsletters after the lapse of press controls in
1679 with 17 titles coming out between that point and 1682, most nota-
bly those with the word ‘Protestant’ in the title, indicating a newspaper
of Whig orientation. As during the Civil War, partisan publications
flourished as there were profits to be made out of political and religious
rivalries. These papers demonstrated that there was a suppressed popu-
lar demand for political debate in print to which the official newspapers
had contributed very little. The following two extracts, on the same
front page of the same edition, show how representation of popular
political opinion could be reported in the form of a petition while the
newspaper also contrived to produce a tragic and poignant tale of
domestic violence to maintain a broader news agenda:

The Protestant (Domestick) Intelligence or, News both from CITY
and COUNTRY Published to prevent false reports. Fryday, January
14. 1680.
  January, 13. 1680. A Common Council was held at Guild Hall, to
whom this day several Eminent citizens presented a petition, which
is (verbatim) as followeth.
  The humble Petition of the Citizens and Inhabitants of the
said City.
Sheweth,
  That we being deeply sensitive of the evils and mischiefs hanging
over this Nation in general, and this City in particular in respect of
the danger of the Kings person, the Protestant Religion, and our
well establish’d Governemnt by the continued hellish and damna-
ble designes of the papists and others and their adherents: And
knowing no way (under heaven) so effectual to preserve his Royal
Majesty (and ‘tis) from the utter ruin and destruction threatened; as
by the speedy sitting of this present Parliament, the surprising Pro-
rogation of which greatly adds to and increases the just fears and
jealousies of your Petitioners minds . . .
From

Kent-Street, in the Parish of St. Georges-Southwark, we

have this following Relation, That on Tuesday last, a Servant-maid
was so prevailed with by the Seducements of the Devil, as to attempt
the Murther of her Masters Child which she had in charge; where-
upon she carrying it up stairs, got a knife, and putting the same to
the Throat of it, began to eat it; but whether by the Remorse of
Conscience, or by reason of the crying of the Child she feared some
body would surprise her in the fact; she let the knife drop out of her

The Language of Newspapers

hand after she had cut about a quarter of an inch deep, and then
seeing the Infant bleeding, she took a Dose of Poison, (as she has
since reported) prepared to end her wretched Life . . .

Heraclitus Ridens; Or, a Discourse between Jest and Earnest, where
many a True Word is spoken in opposition to all Libellers against the
government first appeared on 1 February 1681, and continued once a
week to 22 August 1682. It demonstrated that commentary on contem-
porary political issues, couched in an accessible dialogue format
reminiscent of the playlets of the Civil War was a viable commercial
proposition for the printer and clearly found a ready readership. Suther-
land has commented that it was ‘written in colloquial English, but
addressed to readers of some politeness who could appreciate a witty
turn of phrase’ (Sutherland, 1986: 18).

Between 1694 and 1695, the printing Act lapsed once more and for

the final time. Any form of pre-publication regulation had become
impossible to police by this point because of King William’s difficulties
in maintaining control of printing in a bipartisan parliament and on
account of the fact that printers were increasingly willing to challenge
the monopoly of the Stationers’ Company by pandering to profitable
public taste. In 1695 The Post Boy, The Flying Post, The Post Man were
quick to capitalize on this. They were published three times a week on
Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, to match the days when the mail left
London in the evenings to maximize distribution to the rest of the coun-
try. Restrictions in the supply of news often meant, however, that early
issues were limited to a single page. In order to supplement a variable
flow of what we might call nowadays ‘hard’ news, miscellany was once
more a prominent feature into the early eighteenth century as reports
from home and overseas, contributions from readers in the form of
letters, religious news, cultural commentary, shipping and commercial
news all vied for the attention of an inquisitive public. There were
experiments in form as well as frequency with one of the most notable
being, Ichabod Dawks experiment from 1696 in his Dawks’s News-
Letter. This was an evening newspaper which was notable for its use of
a script which mimicked a handwritten style, designed to bring, he
hoped, something of the personal tone of the handwritten newsletter to
his new printed newspaper.

The Daily Courant of 1702 is recorded as the first regular English

daily newspaper and it is the regularity of its appearance which makes
it a significant element in the development of journalism. It was a half
sheet on one side of paper, with two columns all made up of foreign,
second-hand news. It developed over the first months of its produc-
tion into 4 to 6 pages and came to include advertising and shipping
news. Its advantage lay in the access to reliable foreign intelligence

Putting on a Style

which was guaranteed by its editor’s (Samuel Buckley) access to
extensive news sources of the Secretary of State’s office (Harris, 1987:
156). This dependence on the proximity of any reliable daily news-
paper to government sources and dependence on the good opinion of
those same sources for its continuing privileges was to remain a hand-
icap to the newspaper’s wider social and political independence for
many years.

The eighteenth century has been described as one of ‘increased

social intercourse’ (Siebert, 1965: 305) and the newspaper played an
important part in this process of socialization. This was particularly
pronounced in their contribution to a language of debate which can be
said to have moulded ‘public opinion’ (Barker, 1998). Yet it was the
review format, developing in parallel with the newspaper, which
enabled authors to begin to educate readers into political and cultural
debates. Central to the review form were authors such as Defoe, Addison
and Steele who in their contrasting ways fashioned a public ready for a
more regular engagement with social debates through the development
of a language which sought to encourage the participation of its
targeted readers in these debates within a rhetoric of inclusivity.

Daniel Defoe: The Review

Daniel Defoe was a writer whose abilities spanned fiction as well as
periodical publication and his journalism would be classified today as
opinion or editorial rather than news, but at this juncture the distinc-
tion between these genres was uncertain (Milic, 1977: 36). Nevertheless,
he insisted that his style should be as clear as possible to better effect
that persuasion:

If any man was to ask me what I would suppose to be a perfect
style or language, I would answer, that in which a man speaking to
five hundred people, of all common and various capacities, idiots
or lunatics excepted, should be understood by them all. (Herd,
1952: 51)

He was regarded as a skilful enough communicator by first minister
Harley to be sponsored for his periodical writing in order to propagate
government views. The resulting Review from 1704 provided foreign
news as part of political commentary and indeed political preferences
on issues of economic policy and trade formed the backbone of the
publication. The original full title of his review indicates the level of
rivalry between competing accounts of the contemporary world which
jostled for public attention in this period as well as the appreciation of
the need to provide something lighter as an addition to the mixture:

The Language of Newspapers

A REVIEW of the Affairs of FRANCE and all of EUROPE . . . Purg’d
from the Errors and Partiality of News-Writers and Petty-Statesmen,
of all Sides. WITH AN Entertaining Part in Every Sheet, BEING,
ADVICE from the Scandal. CLUB, To the Curious Enquirers; in
Answer to Letters sent them for that Purpose.

He, characteristically, addresses the stylistic exigencies of treating mat-
ters of economic and political importance, highlighting the need for a
mode of address which suits his subject matter and claiming expertise
and authority in these areas while appreciating that there are other
more scientific matters which he will be pleased to take advice on with
regard to the appropriateness of language:

Let not those gentlemen who are critics in style, in method or man-
ner, be angry that I have never pulled off my cap to them in humble
excuse for my loose way of treating the world as to language, expres-
sions, and politeness of phrase. Matters of this nature differ from
most things a man can write. When I am busied writing essays and
matters of science, I shall address them for their aid and take as
much care to avoid their displeasure as becomes me; but when I am
on the subjects of trade, and the variety of casual story, I think
myself a little loose of the bonds of cadence and perfections of style,
and satisfy myself in my study to be explicit, easy, free, and very
plain. (Review, Vol. 1, Preface, February 1705)

His robust and earthy prose style is ideally suited to the communica-
tion of the salient points of commerce in the burgeoning colonial
economy of early-eighteenth-century England and his celebration of
the power of capital to create the structures of bourgeois civic identity
reads like a popularization of the civil society of the human subject
through rights in property espoused by philosophers such as Locke:

Mr Review Plumps For Free Trade
. . . I wonder sometimes at the ignorance of those people and
nations whose gentry pretend to despise families raised by trade.
Why should that which is the wealth of the world, the prosperity and
health of kingdoms and towns, be accounted dishonourable? If we
respect trade, as it is understood by merchandising, it is certainly the
most noble, most instructive, and improving of any way of life . . . the
merchant makes a wet bog become a populous state; enriches beg-
gars, ennobles mechanics, raises not families only, but towns, cities,
provinces, and kingdoms. (Review, Vol. 3, No. 2, 3 January 1706)

Addison and Steele: The Tatler and the Spectator

Despite the range and impact of Defoe’s commentary on politics and
commerce, the experimentation with form and style in the periodical

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press was most fully cultivated in the early century in the work on the
Tatler and the Spectator by Steele and Addison which most succinctly
represented the cultural concerns of the rising bourgeois class and
provided it with a guide to taste and manners. The Tatler began in 1709,
appearing three times a week as a folio half sheet and costing a penny.
Its initial author, Steele, had been a successful playwright and he
contributed a good ear for the patterns of polite conversation and argu-
ment into the pages of his publication leading commentators to observe:
‘. . . its tone was simple – conversational’ (Graham, 1926: 65). From the
start, it was clear that chasing after the latest news was not going to be
its forte: ‘. . . we shall not, upon a dearth of news, present you with
musty foreign edicts, or dull proclamations . . .’ (Tatler, No. 1, 12 April
1709).

From the seventh edition, he began soliciting letters to the editor,

news was dropped from number 83 in the face of fierce competition
from specialist newspapers and the readership was cultivated in a com-
plex construction of taste, opinion and manners. Strong editorial
coherence contributed to its success and was provided with the fic-
tional character of Isaac Bickerstaff as the porte parole of the authors.
All the features of the Tatler had been seen before but it was in the over-
all tone and ambition of the journal to mould polite taste that made it
distinctive. It has been observed that:

The Tatler has more of the tone of the coffee-house, even of the tav-
ern. It appealed, and was designed to appeal, more to the fashionable
world. (Ross, 37)

To this end, it presented a calm and gentle style of debate far removed
from the invective of party politics or the opinionated certainties of the
old aristocratic classes and sometimes alluded to this in subtle fashion
in its commentary as when Steele writes on duelling:

A letter from a young lady, written in the most passionate Terms,
wherein she laments the Misfortune of a Gentleman, her Lover, who
was lately wounded in a Duel, has turned my Thoughts to that Sub-
ject, and enclined me to examine into the Causes which precipitate
Men into so fatal a Folly . . . it is worth our Consideration to exam-
ine into this Chimaerical groundless Humour, and to lay every other
Thought aside, till we have strip’d it of all its false Pretences to
Credit and Reputation amongst Men. (Tatler, 4 June to 7 June
1709)

The Spectator appeared daily from March 1711 to December 1712 and
continued to eschew news as a staple. Editorial coherence was pro-
vided through the character of the enigmatic figure of the ‘author’
Mr. Spectator and it was addressed to the morning tea-table, to the

The Language of Newspapers

reflective hours of the civil servants and merchants represented in its
subscription list (Ross, 1982: 37). The characterizations, personaliza-
tion of issues of taste, good manners and good opinion, which were
developed in these two periodicals, contributed to a general cultural
appreciation of the motivations of individuals and of social self-inter-
est. These in turn, it has been argued, contribute to the psychological
mechanisms of the early novel (Watt, 1957; Hunter, 1990; Black, 2008)
and in their periodic style also to the initial picaresque of early narra-
tive conventions within the novel. Davis (1983) argues that beyond the
periodical, newspapers share with the novel many of the same discur-
sive features of the late seventeenth century drawing as they do upon a
related set of narrative and psychological principles.

The polite range of discussion of these periodicals may have been

very different in style from the mercuries and the Whig/Tory polemic of
the Popish Plot period, yet it still carried a subtle yet potent political
ambition within its language and one which was to have long lasting
consequences:

. . . its major impulse is one of class consolidation, a codifying of the
norms and regulating of the practices whereby the English bour-
geoisie may negotiate an historic alliance with its social superiors.
(Eagleton, 1991: 10)

As a complement to their cultural ambitions to foster civilized cultural
debate on the contemporary world, the Tatler and Spectator directed
themselves beyond the traditionally narrow appeal to men who were
interested in hard political discussion to base their appeal to a female
audience, at least in part, and provided a resilient commercial model for
this aspect of later popular newspaper miscellanies (Harris, 1987: 179).

Control and resistance

Despite the fact that it was the occasional pamphlets, with their largely
uncontrolled and disruptive effects on public opinion, which were the
chief target of the Stamp and Advertising Duty legislation which was
introduced in 1712, the timing of the legislation indicates that it was
finally Samuel Buckley’s critical comments in his Daily Courant on
the conduct of the war with the Dutch which may have ultimately
tipped Parliament into action. There was also a strong economic moti-
vation. In addition to concerns over the influence of erroneous or
seditious material, at the start of the eighteenth century, there was a
pressing need for the government to raise funds via commodity taxa-
tion and newspapers by this time very conveniently fell into this
category. Such taxation was to play a formative role in the shaping of

Putting on a Style

newspaper language until its eventual lifting in the mid-nineteenth
century.

There were many experiments in the format of the emerging newspa-

per of the early eighteenth century which sought to probe the political
potential of the medium. In an early example, the London Journal called
for an investigation of the South Sea Bubble investment disaster and
‘public justice’ for the managers of the scheme. Its most venomous pieces
were signed CATO. By 12 August 1721, it was selling 10,000 copies per
edition. Cato combined calls for compensation with warnings against
what he perceived as attempts to reintroduce restrictions on press
freedoms, moving as in the example below from the general to the par-
ticular in terms of the machinations of political ministries against the
press. His targeting of Walpole’s administration was clear and damaging
enough in its barb to demand censorious action from the government:

Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as
Wisdom; and no such Thing as Publick Liberty . . . Guilt only dreads
Liberty of Speech, which drags it out of its lurking Holes, and
exposes its Deformity and Horrour to Daylight . . . Freedom of
Speech is the great Bulwark of Liberty; they prosper and die
together: and it is the Terror of Traytors and Oppressors, and a
Barrier against them . . . All Ministries, therefore, who were Oppres-
sors, or intending to be Oppressors, have been loud in their
complaints against Freedom of Speech and the License of the Press.
(London Journal, 4 February 1720)

Walpole moved swiftly and bought the paper in 1722, dismissed the
editors and changed the line of the paper to something more acceptable
to the government. Despite this example of political intervention by a
regular newspaper, it was the pamphlet form which continued to flour-
ish. Furthermore, it was the unofficial and therefore illegal, irregular
and incendiary, hawked material which most benefited from the
creation of the category of officially stamped newspapers from 1712.
It could undercut officially sanctioned newssheets and had an aura of
greater freedom of expression. Periodical news could not have emerged
as it did through the middle years of the century if the mainstream
press had not felt obliged to enter into competition with this style of
unofficial publication in its claims to represent the interests of the pub-
lic and to provide them with fresh and provocative intelligence and the
stirrings of controversy in political debate. Thus the discourse of news-
paper language was shaped both inside the mainstream and as a
competitive response to forces outside of that mainstream. In a political
climate, where, after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, the King was no
more than a privileged member of the political establishment, stripped
of quasi-divine hereditary rights, the newspapers needed to place the

The Language of Newspapers

highest priority on persuasion. There was little genuine desire or
political motivation to produce impartial accounts particularly of
politics:

The preoccupation of the journalist lay quite outside the accurate
reporting of facts; there were no facts more important, nor more
urgent, than the fate of factions; it was these that provided the reve-
nue, the market and the intellectual compulsion behind the product.
(Smith, 1978: 157–158)

This need for political persuasion is what prompted first Harley and
then Walpole (1715–1742) to develop a network of writers and pub-
lishers who could be relied upon to accept financial subsidy in return
for a wide range of privileged access to information. This made for
newspapers which were more useful to political elites than to the gen-
erally interested public and meant that disaffection with government
came to be articulated through a variety of textual experiments within
periodical publications as they sought to test the boundaries of official
tolerance.

The Craftsman

Critical debate began to work itself into the periodical press once again
within the restrictions imposed by the political and editorial control of
Walpole. The Craftsman was the most famous political essay paper of
the period. It emanated from a ruling class which felt its position in the
constitution to be threatened by Walpole’s apparent monopoly on
power and opinion. From 7 December 1726, under the pseudonym of
Caleb Danvers, Nicholas Amhurst, a former Whig, was employed by
William Pulteney to write in opposition to Walpole and particularly his
control of the press. Yet the most significant contributor was a dissent-
ing Tory Lord Bolinbroke. The way that such newspapers operated
in providing a textual community of argument targeted against the
government has been highlighted in the following terms:

Like other political newspapers, the Craftsman offered its sponsors
a variety of benefits, among which the creation of an illusion of
group solidarity was one of the most useful. The presentation of
argument and comment through the single fictional author helped,
however superficially, to conceal the fissures within the heteroge-
neous opposition. (Harris, 1987: 114)

Its pinnacle of notoriety and provocation came in the form of a letter,
reputedly translated out of the Persian language. This was a common
strategy in the early eighteenth century for addressing domestic issues
while avoiding the official wrath of politicians which would have

Putting on a Style

befallen a more literal approach. On this occasion, the savagery of the
satire was enough to cause outrage even in this disguised form as it
clearly attacked Walpole and impugned his ambition and reputation for
financial probity. It is interesting to read how it sets up the satirical
attack by disingenuously claiming that as the author wants to provide
more than just dull discourse on political matters, he will provide a
translation of an exotic tale from a friend who has recently returned to
England after travelling abroad. It was a standard rhetorical device
to veil the explicit meaning but one whose opacity still allowed readers
to deduce the true target of the satire:

Having as yet given the Reader little besides grave discourse on
publick matters, and foreseeing that, during the Session of Parlia-
ment, I shall be obliged to continue daily in the same track, I am
willing to take this one opportunity of presenting him with some-
thing which has no relation at all to Publick affairs, but is of a nature
purely amusing, and entirely devoid of Reflection upon any person
whatsoever.
My

Friend

Alvarez (a man not unknown to many here, by his fre-

quent journeys to England) did some time since make me a present
of a Persian manuscript, which he met with while he follow’d the
fortunes of Miriweis. An exact translation of the first chapter has
been made at my request by the learned Mr Solomon Negri, and is
as follows;
  The first Vision of Camilick
  In the Name of God, ever merciful, and of Haly his prophet.
I slept in the plains of Bagdad, and I dreamed a dream . . .
  In the midst of these execrations enter’d a Man, dress’d in a plain
habit, with a purse of gold in his hand. He threw himself forward
into the room, in a bluff, ruffianly manner. A Smile, or rather a
Snear, sat on his Countenance. His face was bronz’d over with a
glare of Confidence. An arch malignity leer’d in his eye. Nothing
was so extraordinary as the effect of this person’s appearance. They
no sooner saw him, but they all turn’d their Faces from the Canopy,
and fell prostrate before him. He trod over their backs without any
Ceremony, and march’d directly up to the Throne. He opened his
Purse of Gold, which he took out in Handfulls, and scatter’d amongst
the Assembly. While the greater Part were engaged in scrambling
for these Pieces, he seiz’d, to my inexpressible Surprize, without
the least Fear, upon the sacred Parchment itself. He rumpled it
rudely up, and crammed it into his Pocket. Some of the people
began to murmur. He threw more Gold, and they were pacified.
No sooner was the parchment taken away, but in an instant I saw
that august Assembly in Chains; nothing was heard through the
whole Divan, but the Noise of Fetters and Clank of Irons. (The
Craftsman, No XVI, 23–27 January 1727)

The Language of Newspapers

The Craftsman became a measure against which newspapers’ engage-
ment with political discussion and opposition to government could be
assessed and continues to hold a high place in historical accounts:

This much-admired paper created the expectation of an absolutely
relentless journalistic opposition to overbearing authority.
(Sommerville, 1996: 133)

Nathaniel Mist

A more consistent, and therefore much more dangerous strategy was
used by Nathaniel Mist. He used his papers as a platform to create a
highly personal dialogue between politics and his own interpretations
of them for his readers. The Weekly Journal; or, Saturday’s Post began
on 15 December 1716, became Mist’s Weekly Journal in 1725 and con-
tinued despite a change of name to Fog’s Weekly Journal until 1737.
Along with the London Journal, Mist’s Weekly Journal was the first to
fully explore the potential of regular political essays in a newspaper
and such interventions were clearly identified by Mist as of intrinsic
concern to any participant interested in public debates:

There is nothing that concerns the attention of a private man as
much, as the actions of persons in the administration of public
affairs. (Mist’s Weekly Journal, 3 February 1728)

Mist was constantly in trouble for his publications until in January
1728 he fled to France to avoid further conflict with the authorities.
Thereafter, he continued with Fog’s Weekly Journal which remained
the most prominent anti-Whig paper. It frequently addressed public
perceptions of politics and the implicit role of periodicals in bringing
scrutiny of that process to their readers:

It was the saying of a very wise man, that the Speculation of
Political Affairs, is a much honester Task, than the Practice of them
. . . The people can easily see when their Prince is abus’d by selfish
Counsellors; and the Reason is plain, for ‘tis they who must feel the
Effect of such a Conduct: A Knave in Power may find Means
of obscuring Things (at least for some Time), from an indulgent
Master; but the Multitude is an Argus with a Thousand Eyes, and
some of those Eyes are endued with a most penetrating Sight. (Fog’s
Weekly Journal, No. 6, Saturday, 2 November 1728)

There was a section on Foreign Affairs, but essays in the form of contri-
butions were the most prominent features. Home affairs included crime
news and deaths, highwaymen, shipping news, accidents and deporta-
tions as had become the pattern in most conventional newspapers of
the time. The polemic and the controversy which Mist’s publications

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attracted were popular and attracted advertisers eager to have their
products associated with such provocative material which was clearly
reaching a comparatively widespread readership because of its politi-
cal notoriety. It was not all one-way-traffic however and the government
made various and repeated attempts to close down dissent, through
suppression but also by the harnessing of prominent writers to produce
a paper to put it in a good light and to provide it with privileged infor-
mation and a guarantee of material not available to other publications.
In 1735, the government organized the talents of many of its subsidized
writers in a single paper, and founded the Daily Gazetteer.

The Gentleman’s Magazine

Despite the government’s hopes that the public would be content with
news provided through its own sponsored sources, there was an increas-
ing pressure to test the boundaries of acceptable access to public
discussion of parliamentary debate, independent of government
censure or control. Unlike political commentary which, within the
limits of libel and sedition, was developing in the essay papers, Parlia-
mentary reporting flouted the law no matter what its content as it had
been outlawed since the Restoration. Such reporting broke out not in
the essay paper or the newspaper but in another and newer genre, the
miscellaneous magazine. It was a very popular feature so that it was in
the interests of periodical publications to find ways around official pro-
hibition. Abel Boyer started the first post-revolutionary reports on
Parliament in his Political State of Great Britain 1703–1729, which was
a monthly publication and only published material from sessions of
Parliament which were already complete. It was therefore out-of-date
and also expensive. The coverage was also pragmatically tinged towards
the government so that it could act as a post-facto rationalization of the
power politics of the day.

Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine from January 1731 provided

digests of news, literary and political comment, in response to the
feeling that the world was becoming too hectic and too crammed full of
things to be able to keep up with them in their original form. To this
blend, it added the first reports contemporaneous parliamentary
proceedings in issue 5 May 1731. From June 1738, it had taken to the
ingenious devices of reporting parliament as a Roman Assembly with
politicians sporting classical names such as Tullius Cicero and M. Cato
and later the Parliament of Lilliput with, for example, the magnificently
ironic heading: ‘Prime Minister’s Speech from the Senate of Magna
Lilliputia’ and observations such as: ‘Mr Gulliver, astonished at the
wonderful conformity between the Constitution of England and Lilliput

The Language of Newspapers

. . .’ (July 1738). It used techniques such as blanking out key letter of
names and using anagrammatic names so that it could not be consid-
ered a verbatim report of actual parliament with real politicians. Door
attendants were bribed to allow access to reporters who would dis-
creetly record the debates for later regurgitation. It was a huge success,
and by 1739 had a circulation of 30,000, which allows us, according to
Sommerville, to take it as ‘an inventory of the mentality produced by a
free press’ (Sommerville, 1996: 158).

John Wilkes

The career of John Wilkes (1725–1797) indicates the potential for
building bridges between an individual’s political motivations and the
people using a periodical publication which was able to transmit those
interests through direct, topical and powerful writing to a wide and
regular readership. From 1762, in his essay paper North Briton, Wilkes
claimed to champion English liberty and the rights of the individual,
particularly through a populist campaign which ridiculed George III’s
Scottish first minister, Lord Bute. To maximize its populist potential, it
based itself within and amplified common fears of the perceived threat
of Franco-Scottish Jacobites. From the first edition, its intentions were
guaranteed to invoke the wrath of the government and were stated in as
plain a language as suited its populist desires to stir up unrest:

The liberty of the press is the birthright of a BRITON, and has by the
wisest men in all ages been thought the finest bulwark of the liber-
ties of this country. It has ever been the terror of bad ministers,
whose dark and dangerous designs, or whose weakness, inability,
or duplicity, have been detected and shewn to the public in too
strong colours for them long to bear up against the general odium.
No wonder that such various and infinite arts have been employed,
at one time entirely to suppress it, at another to take of the force and
blunt the edge of this most sacred weapon, left for the defence of
truth and liberty. (The North Briton, No. 1, Saturday, 5 June 1762)

Part of Wilkes’ self-declared motivation was that the North Briton had
been brought out to counter the Briton being published under the Royal
coat of arms. By issue number two, he is already criticizing first minis-
ter Bute, his place in parliament and doubting his financial abilities to
run the Exchequer. For Wilkes, the Scots are characterized as rebellious
by nature and led by despot chieftains. This aggressive vindictiveness
reached its crescendo in the notorious number 45 of 23 April 1763:

A despotic minister will always endeavour to dazzle his prince
with high-flown ideas of the prerogative and honour of the crown,

Putting on a Style

which the minister will make a parade of firmly maintaining. I wish
as much as any man in the kingdom to see the honour of the crown
maintained in a manner truly becoming Royalty. I lament to see it
sunk even to prostitution.

This provides a powerful demonstration of how a newspaper could lay
rhetorical claims to speak on behalf of a nation, reinforcing the point
made by Anderson (1986) about the style of expression being of para-
mount importance in the legitimation of a nation’s claims to existence.
This sort of rhetoric was to have an effect in the construction of both
metropolitan and national identities and could be called upon either
conservatively for patriotic purposes or for radical ends in the case of
Wilkes and others who followed him. Furthermore, despite the fact that
the claims made for the value and status of the ‘liberty of the press’ were
clearly more a rhetorical conceit rather than anything that could be
demonstrated in fact, the political resonance of the phrase meant that it
was capable throughout the eighteenth century and beyond of rallying
people to its cause and the various motivations of newspaper editors.

When Bute was removed from office on the strength of popular

demand, it was the first time that the press had played such a promi-
nently proactive role in removing a politician from power and showed
that it was possible for opinion to drive the events which become the
news. In addition, despite Wilkes’ subsequent exile, the notoriety of the
case meant that in 1765 general warrants, which had long been the bane
of publishers’ and political writers’ lives and which enabled the author-
ities to make general sweeps for unspecified material, were declared
illegal, indicating how popular support for Wilkes had made it untena-
ble for the Courts to continue to pursue such prosecutions where they
were unpopular and difficult to pursue to a satisfactory conclusion.

The right to report Parliament was challenged by The Parliamentary

Spy in 1769, and The Whisperer, in 1770, reported Parliament regularly
and scurrilously. From 1771, once Wilkes’ Middlesex Journal had faced
down another legal challenge, Parliament could eventually be reported
with impunity. This, combined with other major events of the last quar-
ter of the century such as the American Revolution and the French
Revolution, heightened the political content of the mainstream London
newspapers and their growing credibility to their advertisers as genu-
inely independent and authoritative organs. There was an increasing
resonance around the discourse of public opinion which the newspa-
pers fed into, often out of the sheer self-interest in presenting themselves
as first and foremost the champions of the public, their customers:

. . . it is clear that public opinion was increasingly associated with
those who read newspapers and other forms of printed matter, and

The Language of Newspapers

that this was a trend encouraged by the newspapers themselves.
(Barker, 2000: 28)

The Public Advertiser

One of the most prominent advertising-led periodicals of the period,
the Public Advertiser, drew most publicity to itself by the publication
of readers’ letters on matters of political controversy. In addition to its
letters, it fitted well within the miscellany of the eighteenth century
newspaper which encompassed the results of prize draws, news from
various government departments such as Navy Office and Stamp Office,
shipping news and gossip from polite society. There was a steady sup-
ply of criminal news from the courts as well as news from abroad but it
is most renowned for its exchanges of letters on the politics of the day.
Letters to newspapers were becoming commonplace by the mid-
century, always signed with imposing sounding noms de plume such
as ‘Rusticus’, ‘Cassius’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, ‘A Wilkite’ and ‘A True Briton’
and some, such as ‘Junius’, made full use of this anonymous tradition
of political commentary and even provocation in the Public Advertiser
from 21 January 1769. In the issue of 19 December 1769 ‘Junius’ wrote
to the King:

Sire – it is the misfortune of your life . . . that you should never have
been acquainted with the language of truth, until you heard it in the
complaints of your people. It is not, however, too late to correct the
error.

The nineteenth-century historian of newspapers Fox-Bourne assessed
the contribution of ‘Junius’ to the development of newspaper journal-
ism in the following terms, considering he had, ‘. . . raised journalism
to a far more important position than it had ever held before . . .’
(Fox-Bourne, 1998: 190).

While these letters were vitriolically critical of monarch and govern-

ment policy, they had the advantage of adding to the commercial
success of the newspaper and within the year they had doubled its
sales. The notoriety and success of the letters drew influential corre-
spondents to the newspaper and consolidated its position as an
important opinion broker as well as continuing to boost its advertising
revenue.

Commercial success and social status

Throughout the eighteenth century, advertising continued incremen-
tally to drive the commercial expansion of newspapers and a front page
dominated by advertisements, was becoming the fashion since the

Putting on a Style

advertisers accrued greater influence as their financial input increased.
This meant that by the final third of the eighteenth century, newspapers
had become established commercially and were becoming more confi-
dent in espousing a regular public engagement with political issues
than they had been while they had been financially insecure. By the
1760s, more papers were adopting four columns per page yet the
increase in wordage facilitated by increasing regularity of news did not
immediately lead to improvements in the layout of the paper. The
advertisements were more effectively and more imaginatively laid out
than the news content, in fact, often being illustrated with woodcuts
and deployed in imaginative eye-catching typefaces. The shape and
structure of news was nevertheless becoming more systematized. It was
laid out into regular grids with titled sections for staples such as:
LONDON, PORT NEWS, IRELAND, BANKRUPTS. Large bold capitals
signalled the initial letters of stories and reports. There were brief
reports on the debates and motions of Parliament. Letters from readers
were selected to emphasize an identifiable editorial policy. There were
articles of intelligence and postscripts from other leading London
papers together with prices, stocks, high water marks, the arrivals and
departures of ships, gossip, social commentary, theatre announcements
and reviews. Reports on the goings-on at court or in broader elite society
had become slightly less deferential and came to include the marriages
and deaths of the great and good at home and abroad.

Towards the end of the century, newspaper contents reflected social

variety as well as variety in content but newspapers were still predomi-
nantly aimed at the prosperous middle classes, concentrating on
commercial and financial news. With more time to collect and reflect,
the weeklies had more general news and a political article or an essay
had become an accepted inclusion on their front page. Although there
was an accumulation of oppositional voices in the press towards the
end of the century, public opinion remained something which could be
dominated quite effectively by: ‘those few individuals who could
manipulate this newly important discursive political construction
through print’ (McDowell, 1998: 3). The readership of newspapers may
have laid rhetorical claims to include the population as a whole but in
effect it was restricted to a predominantly metropolitan middle class.

Cheap, unstamped papers aimed at urban lower classes had been

suppressed by law in 1743 meaning that the elite political newspaper
did not need to compete with them for trade. Subsequently, there was
no attempt by the mainstream newspapers to break into a wider market.
They kept their diet restricted to political and economic news in the
main and let the unofficial and ephemeral media cater for the lower
sections of the population. This segmentation of the market was

The Language of Newspapers

consolidating a reading public along the lines of social stratification.
The political coverage and even commentary of the commercially suc-
cessful newspaper did not imply that there was much up for discussion.
Most pieces reflected a certainty that the reader would share the
suppositions and intentions of the author (Black, 1991: 246):

To the Author of The London Evening Post,
SIR,
OUR Merchants, I perceive, complain heavily, that they can find
no sort of vent for the goods and manufactures which they send to
the island of Minorca; and say, that the island seems to be ours only
in name; for that a number of Frenchmen still reside there, who
pour into that place French and other foreign commodities, who
enjoy every freedom, and run away with all the trade of that island.
Now, Sir, if that complaint be true, it calls loudly upon the Minis-
try for immediate redress; for can any thing be worse policy, than to
suffer the trade and commerce of France to increase and flourish in
that island to the ruin and destruction of our own? Your’s etc.
BREVITAS

(The London Evening Post, Saturday,

31 December to Tuesday, 3 January 1764)

Newspaper discussions of politics appeared popular simply because it
was extended beyond the tradition narrow elite in contact with the
actual business of government. Politics, however, remained in flux,
although actual criticism until the French Revolution was only of
politicians and of a political system which was perceived as being
reformable. There was no call for radical change to the social system or
the franchise. The only radical critique came from the Jacobites until
the time of the French Revolution. As Black had put it, newspapers
were: ‘Sympathetic to popular distress but opposed to popular action’
(Black, 1991: 272).

The increased take-up of advertising in the later years of the century

meant that new newspapers were able to offset the expense of circula-
tion taxes and the Morning Chronicle, 1770, Morning Post, 1772, and
Universal Daily Register (Times) 1785 were launched.

John Walter on 1 January 1785 in the Daily Universal Register well

expressed the thriving miscellany of the contemporary daily
newspaper:

. . . the Register of the times, and faithful recorder of every species
of intelligence; it ought not to be engrossed by any particular object;
but, like a well covered table, it should contain something suited to
every palate; observations on the dispositions of our own and for-
eign courts should be provided for the political reader; debates
should be reported for the amusement and information of those

Putting on a Style

who may be particularly fond of them; and a due attention should
be paid to the interests of trade, which are so greatly promoted by
advertisements.

Extending editorial credibility

This increase in revenue also provided the newspapers with the
opportunity to extend their credibility as independent sources of infor-
mation and opinion as it released them from their previous reliance on
political insiders to provide them with information in exchange for
publication privileges. At the end of the century there was a consoli-
dation of the position of the daily newspaper as a rival to the essay
paper in terms of its ability to intervene regularly and effectively in the
realm of ideas, opinions and public affairs. The importance of the
single owner and his relationship with a strong editor became another
key component of the editorial character and consistency of these end-
of-century newspapers. The Morning Chronicle edited by James Perry
and the Morning Post edited by Daniel Stuart begin to demonstrate what
independent newspapers could achieve. The former was the dominant
newspaper of its generation after Perry bought it in 1789 employing
Sheridan, Ricardo, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Sir James Mackintosh,
Thomas Moore and William Hazlitt and to be hailed, in retrospect as:
‘the greatest paper in England’ (Herd, 1952: 91). There was, however, still
a lack of professional journalists and consequently newspapers of the
1790s still actively encouraged correspondents to send in items includ-
ing letters on issues of topical political concern (Black, 1991: 283).

Over the course of the late eighteenth century, public reading of

newspapers had become commonplace. Taverns, barbers shops and
especially the coffee houses which were spreading at the same rapid
pace as the newspaper throughout the land (Pincus, 1995), were all part
of a complex network of outlets for newspapers and informal discus-
sion groups which gathered to read and to exchange opinion on their
reading matter. Inevitably this broadened the social base of readership
from those who could afford to buy and read their own copy to those
who could borrow a copy or even listen to others reading aloud. Some
newspapers were written in an overtly rhetorical style in order to
enhance the effect of reading aloud to groups, drawing upon traditions
of orality (Ong, 1982) and this matched other fora for the public
dissemination of ideas, the pulpit and the public meeting. The news-
papers were beginning to play a role in the education of a population
into citizenship with all of the implications and demands of this status.
This would have a cumulative effect on broad political education:
‘Where pamphlets, prints, ballads and verses were occasional, the

The Language of Newspapers

newspaper offered the possibility of continuous communication and
commentary on political events’ (Harris, 1996: 4).

Continuities with older forms of printed and manuscript publica-

tions persisted. There were regular reports on assizes and executions
especially the adventures of highwaymen which competed with the
broadside and ballad versions, while shipping news, diplomatic reports,
the correspondence of London merchants, accounts from travellers,
and items from foreign diplomats found their way into the spaces of the
newspaper as they had once found their way into newsletters of old.
There were also experiments in juxtaposing reports or using formats to
cross-fertilize other issues in the news. The London Chronicle of
14 November to 16 November 1765 shows how the juxtaposition of
letters could be used to extend political commentary on news from
overseas, in this case an exchange between a North American in London
and his friend in America on the developing crisis around the question
of American independence: ‘The Sun of Liberty is indeed fast setting if
not down already, in the American colonies . . .’

From 1792, Fox’s Libel Law meant that it would be the jury not a

judge who would decide whether something was libellous. This was a
key moment in the development of the range of newspaper language
and the range of material it could cover without fear of prosecution.
From 1793, political and popular attention was dominated by the fact
that Britain was at war with France. Newspapers extended their cover-
age of European news and consolidated their growing assertiveness
independent of government by improving their sources, stressing the
speed and superiority of their news and using devices to emphasize
excitement such as headlines and the late insertion of ‘breaking’ items
of news. The editorial or leading article was a device which enhanced
this appearance of autonomy. The leading article started to become part
of the increasingly distinct editorial positioning of newspapers.
(Black, 1991: 281). This editorializing came to ‘lead’ the identity and
opinion of the newspaper and was carefully designed to fit into both
the newspaper’s sense of its own identity and the identity of its reader-
ship imagined as a whole. It was a powerful commercial tool as well as
a potent political weapon.

The provincial press

The eighteenth century saw the rise of the provincial newspaper.
The first English provincial newspaper is estimated as having been the
Norwich Post-Boy from 1701 (Read, 1961: 59). By and large, commer-
cial concerns dominated and they did not attempt to influence local
opinion. They certainly did not carry original editorial articles and

Putting on a Style

rarely carried detailed news-reporting even of local events. They did
carry a lot in the way of advertisements of local produce and businesses.
Yet such commercial interests eventually meant that they were inevita-
bly drawn into increasingly political local debate. Clarke (2004) has
argued that these two functions were increasingly in symbiosis. Local
regional news was chiefly of a police kind, with advertisements as
prominent as they were in the metropolitan press. The regional news-
papers began by orienting the metropolitan political and commercial
emphasis for local readers and later began to differentiate it socially
and politically as the interests of London were not always congruent
with the interests of the various regional centres. This became increas-
ingly important as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum.

The importance of the eighteenth century provincial newspapers

developed incrementally as each required an individual voice and an
identifiable character in order to reflect the specific nature of the com-
munities which they served and from which they drew their profits.
Clarke has also claimed that they played an increasing role in opening
up a national consciousness by providing readers (and listeners) with a
digest of up-to-date news and opinion as well as providing an extended
economic service by advertising a range of books, periodicals, medi-
cines and other goods and services to a non-metropolitan audience
(Clarke, 2004: 125).

In the last quarter of the century local newspapers began to fill their

pages with more in the way of local news. Hitherto, they had merely
provided a rehash of the nationals and become local news enabled
provincial identities and local political issues to be more firmly estab-
lished meaning that a language of local identification and a strengthening
of regional identities emerged. Provincial newspapers moved further to
encompass the political dimension of local communities (Walker,
2006). The first newspaper in the North to develop the techniques of
political commentary through the use of editorials and reporting of
local meetings according to Read (1961: 69) was the Sheffield Register,
published by Joseph Gale from 1787 to 1794. It began by including
extracts and paraphrases from radical authors such as Paine, Godwin,
Horne and Tooke to further establish its credentials and extended from
these to original pieces with the same themes.

On 31 March 1792, the first number of the Manchester Herald

appeared and it was soon advancing the cause of radicalism in its pages
for a local readership:

As France has now been forced into a war by the conduct of Tyrants,
who have presumed to interfere in her internal government; and as
the contest is for the Rights of man on the one part, and for the
Wrongs of Despotism on the other, so this country is particularly

The Language of Newspapers

interested in the event. The great Cause of Liberty demands the
steady support of the brave, the just, and the philanthropic – for
should oppression triumph, the vengeance of power will know no
bounds; Racks and Tortures, Bastilles and Inquisitions, will be the
punishment of those who have dared to avow themselves the Friend
of Liberty. (Manchester Herald, 28 April 1792)

Conclusion

The language of the newspaper begins to consolidate its ability to shape
and respond to changes in English society and its economic structures
and to contribute to the ‘complex interplay between press and popular
politics (Barker, 2000: 1).

The language of the newspapers of the eighteenth century had

become more adept at articulating the political opinions and commer-
cial requirements of a broadened and more self-assured bourgeoisie.
There was still no financial incentive or political motivation for the
owners of newspapers to attempt to target the lower classes. The inclu-
sion of the reader both implicitly and, in the form of letters, explicitly,
ensured that newspapers contributed significantly to the creation of a
national community of taste and opinion.

Introduction

A politically radical press emerged and flourished between the closing
years of the eighteenth century and the middle years of the nineteenth
century. It may have persisted for relatively short periods of time before
economics or political repression forced it to find alternative channels
for the energies which it harnessed. However, its influence on the
language of newspapers has been much more profound and long last-
ing. It was the radical papers and pamphlets of this period which were
to shape a language that appealed beyond the narrow confines of what
had been assiduously developed since 1660 as a bourgeois public
sphere. The scene is well set by the words of Olivia Smith:

The press could record public events and it could enliven debate
among the politically involved. But as a means of social communi-
cation it was, in the eyes of many, a non-starter . . . The social
structures were too solid to admit of any new agency. Journalism
was kept from communicating between classes, from spreading its
truths in such a way as to allow the crowd to set up in judgement
against the governing classes . . . (Smith, 1984: 164–165)

This chapter will explore the ways in which radicals, from Paine
onwards, developed a language which appealed directly to a wider
range of ordinary readers than public writing had ever attempted before
on a periodical basis. These writers drew on a variety of linguistic
sources including nonconformist religion (Goldsworthy, 2006), vernac-
ular speech patterns and notions of the ‘old corruption’ (Hollis, 1970)
as well as, in some cases, a sophisticated brand of popular political
philosophy. After the success of the American and French Revolutions
in opening up popular involvement in politics, English radicalism
developed its own rhetorical styles and narratives designed to appeal
to popular audiences through the nineteenth century. This chapter
will consider certain phases of that language from the early radical
pamphleteers such as Wooler and Cobbett to the Chartist newspaper
editors.

Radical rhetoric: Challenging
patterns of control

The Language of Newspapers

Early-nineteenth-century newspapers: The language
of respectability

Successful daily newspapers in the early nineteenth century had
perfected a blend of commercial and political information which was
couched in a language and approach which would do nothing to
disturb their social or commercial respectability. Their independence
was too reliant on their attractiveness to advertisers to want to shake
the status quo too violently and these newspapers were still overwhelm-
ingly directed towards the interests and politics of a narrow range of
the middle classes. The most celebrated example was the Times which
refused government subsidies and party patronage and enhanced its
reputation for political independence by attracting the advertising rev-
enue which could finance industrial investment such as the steam press
and a wider network of correspondents. The ‘overwhelmingly commer-
cial pressures’ (Black, 1991) on such respectable newspapers were a
major factor in their relatively peripheral role in political reform in the
nineteenth century according to Gilmartin (1996: 85). Yet they did, in
a more subtle way, combine to act upon the nature of public language,
informed by their development of an individual editorial voice for their
papers (Wiener, 1985) enabling a more holistic representation of an
identity in print to emerge.

Divisions between epochs in journalism are rarely if ever neat. As

one set of developments were moving newspapers towards commercial
respectability and therefore a particular sort of political independence,
another, long suppressed, radical impulse was about to gain renewed
momentum. From the early nineteenth century, readerships were being
increasingly identified along class lines because of increasing literacy
levels and a more extensive impetus towards popular political involve-
ment. Previously, it had been assumed that all readers were from
a relatively homogeneous middle class but this was about to change.
As the radical press emerged, seeking to address its readership as a
social class for political purposes, it contested the political status quo.
The legacy of these publications was the restructuring of the language
of political analysis and to prove a major contribution to the formation
of a sense of working-class identity.

The fundamental shifts required in approaches to the language of the

ordinary people to enable a radical plebeian public language to become
established in the press and the political challenge which such lan-
guage threw down to the conformity of the bourgeois political settlement
of the newspapers of the public sphere has been highlighted by Smith:

The political and social effectiveness of ideas about language
derived from the presupposition that language revealed the mind.

Radical Rhetoric

To speak the vulgar language demonstrated that one belonged to the
vulgar class; that is that one was morally and intellectually unfit to
participate in the culture . . . (Smith, 1984: 2)

Radical periodicals and newspapers were key to the process of chal-
lenging these assumptions by creating a politics which was representative
of the interests and lives of ordinary working people in a language
designed to appeal directly to them both as political listeners and polit-
ical agents. The importance of these papers lies chiefly in their formation
of the social identity of class (Thompson, 1967) and through the pro-
duction and consumption of these papers, the working people were
reciprocally involved in creating this identity for themselves.

Part of the formative process of nineteenth-century newspapers

in England which enabled them to articulate the changing discourses
of the popular was the way in which they managed to move from the
textual reproduction of an individual voice to the textual reproduc-
tion of a communal voice. This involved a shift from speaking on
behalf of the people to building a communal form of address in dia-
logue with them. This was an important part of a rhetorical appeal
able to combine the tripartite demands of the popular: well liked by
the people, repre sentative of the people, produced on behalf of the
people (Williams, 1976).

Unstamped weeklies and radical journalism

Between 1793 and 1819, newspapers played an increasingly strident
role in opinion formation and in the polarization of popular political
debate throughout the years of revolutionary turmoil in France and the
subsequent Napoleonic Wars. In Britain, newspapers provided an up-
to-date account of the battles and main events of the Revolutionary
Wars and were among the leading voices in campaigning for peace from
1807. The French Revolution had brought in ‘democratic and demotic’
newspapers (Barker, 2000: 176) which in addition to occasional pam-
phlets played a significant part in creating mass debate. Gilmartin
highlights the growing ambitions of radical reformers to develop a
political opposition which would drive a wedge between the people
and their oppressors in order to focus attention on the common cause
of people against the political establishment. This ambition necessi-
tated a language which could play a direct and material part in the
production and shaping of political debate:

During the Napoleonic Wars and the post-war period of economic
dislocation and popular unrest, as the established parties mapped a
considerable terrain of consensus, the radical movement developed

The Language of Newspapers

a style of political opposition that aimed to displace the distinction
between whig and tory with a more ominous one between the
people and corrupt government, and to make the press a forum for
mobilizing this distinction on behalf of radical parliamentary
reform. (Gilmartin, 1996: 1)

There was, however, competition for the attentions of the lower class
readers with publications such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository
Tracts which were explicitly designed to drive politically seditious
publications from the market and to prevent the spread of radical
opinion. They were priced at a penny or a halfpenny and are estimated
to have sold over two million copies between March 1795 and March
1796. They attempted to provide the rudiments of a moral education
in order to secure loyalty to Christian virtues and were anchored in a
sententious style which did not seek to challenge the more traditional
decorum of language and social subservience expected from the lower
classes.

Thomas Paine: Politics in circulation

The initial generator of the fusion of language and popular political
involvement characteristic of the period was Thomas Paine. If
Wilkes can be considered as a particular journalistic voice of the mid-
eighteenth century, using claims to popularity and an aggressive line in
populist rhetoric to secure his political ends, then Paine had more
altruistic democratic goals which were articulated through the style in
which he tried to engage intellectually with the people as a political
constituency rather than through the language of rabble-rousing pop-
ulism deployed by Wilkes. Thomas Paine produced three political
tracts which were as influential in their content as they were well as in
the language which they developed as a popular forum for political
debate: 1776 Common Sense, 1791 The Rights of Man, 1795 The Age of
Reason. They put politics into circulation among ordinary people
through their combination of topicality and effective calls to political
action in a language which working people could recognize as repre-
sentative of their own interests. He demonstrated that print was, ‘. . .
essentially a publicly accessible and accountable medium of communi-
cation, not a tool under the monopolistic control of government,
journalists or printers’ (Jones, 1996: 12). The revolutionary impact of
his prose broke the existing conventions of the language of popular
appeal demonstrating that it was possible to have, ‘an intellectual
vernacular prose . . . neither vulgar nor refined, neither primitive nor
civilized’ (Smith, 1984: 35).

Radical Rhetoric

Rights of Man is possibly the best illustration of the relevance of his

prose to an English audience, triggered as it was as a polemical response
to a notorious pamphlet by Burke on the revolution in France. It is
journalistic in intent, to the extent that it is based upon contemporary
events and furthermore seeks to persuade readers of a particular
interpretation of those events:

When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel
(for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for
the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the
attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all
knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are
thus imposed upon.
  We now have to review the governments which arise out of a
society, in contradistinction to those which arose out of supersti-
tion and conquest.
  It has been thought a considerable advance toward establishing
the principles of freedom, to say, that government is a compact
between those who govern and those who are governed: but this
cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for
as man must have existed before governments existed, there neces-
sarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently
there could originally exist no governments to form such a compact
with.
  The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves,
each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a com-
pact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only
mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only prin-
ciple on which they have a right to exist. (Van der Weyde, 1925:
73–74)

He enumerates arguments to gather rhetorical momentum, using an
ordinary language laced with specifically English historical references.
The writing style seeks to demonstrate in logical, sequential patterns
the nature of his argument and the fallacy of taking things as they are or
of going with emotion rather than the light of reason. He demands that
the reader look anew at how we come to understand the world, deploy-
ing italics to emphasize key issues in the discussion. He moves from a
personal ‘I’ to a collective ‘we’, signalling the construction of consensus
and varies, in contrast, the forces opposed to rational debate in terms of
abstractions such as ‘the government’ or impersonal constructions such
as ‘It has been thought’. There is, throughout, a strong reliance within
the rhetoric of his exchanges on the assumption of an equal discursive
partnership with his readers, a partnership which draws on shared
understanding but also on mutual intellectual respect.

The Language of Newspapers

He uses the formula of question and answer to construct a debate

with the reader as he manoeuvres from a question to an assertion on
behalf of the common people:

What are the present governments of Europe, but a scene of iniq-
uity and oppression? What is that of England? Do not its inhabitants
say, It is a market where every man has his price, and where
corruption is common traffic, at the expense of a deluded people?
No wonder, then, that the French Revolution is traduced. (Van de
Weyde, 1925: 154)

Smith (1984) claims that there are significant continuities between the
language of the early radical press and the language of the romantics
and their political views on popular culture. Writing of the radical
reformist pamphleteer, Thomas Spence, she suggests a link which can
be traced beyond his work and the language of Cobbett and others into
the nineteenth century:

Spence’s attempts to make English a language that was more availa-
ble to labourers parallels Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s efforts to
vindicate the language of rustics. The creative and political neces-
sity of discovering a written vernacular language was hardly the
concern of only a literary avant-garde but also of social classes that
were demanding to be admitted into what had been defined as
‘civilization’ . . . (Smith, 1984: 249)

John and Leigh Hunt: Philosophical radicalism

The Examiner was founded in 1808 with an explicit commitment to
radical principles. It was undeniably intellectual in tone and liberal/
progressive in its politics. It prided itself upon its wit and elegance in
the spirit of the essayists and pamphleteers of the early eighteenth
century. To emphasize its lineage it took a quotation from Pope as its
masthead slogan: ‘Party is the madness of the many for the benefit of
the few’. Despite these continuities, it espoused different goals in dif-
ferent political times. Its middle-class credentials were apparent in its
commitment to refuse to include advertisements. This was not, as with
the working-class radicals, a form of guerrilla opposition to the system
of commodity capitalism which so alienated working people but more,
as its prospectus states, to prevent it impairing the newspaper’s inde-
pendence and therefore its credibility. It was proud to be able to
include influential radical authors of the day in its pages such as Keats,
Byron and Hazlitt and its language was consciously structured by lit-
erary cadences. The editors skilfully combined letters, detailed
observations from commentators around the country and broader

Radical Rhetoric

political concerns into their reports to leave readers in no doubt of
their position:

THE SLAVE TRADE
The Fourth Report of the Directors of the African Institution
alludes to a most shameful violation of the Abolition Acts, which
was lately detected in the port of London by the exertions of the
institution. (Examiner, 30 September 1810)

Yet it was most notable for the precise and eloquent discussion of the
vocabulary of political opinion, as in the following case, which brought
the opprobrium of the establishment down upon them:

CERTAIN TERMS MAGNANIMOUSLY APPLIED TO THE FRENCH
RULER

When people talk of BONAPARTE as the ‘usurper’ and ‘upstart’ . . .
he is no more the usurper of that throne than the Princes of BRUNS-
WICK have been the usurpers of the throne of Great Britain and
what will be still more shocking perhaps to the delicate ears of the
courtiers is, that the House of NAPOLEON has a better original right
to the Crown than half the ‘legitimate’ Houses on the Continent . . .
(Examiner, No. 141, 30 September 1810)

It was less in the content than in the style of political debate where both
the innovation and the limitations of the Examiner as a political weapon
could be identified. Gilmartin has argued that ‘Hunt’s willingness to
associate peaceful reform with the rhetorical and cognitive style of
the middle class became his point of departure from popular radical
opposition’ (Gilmartin,1996: 223–224).

This sort of approach can be seen in the Preface after its first year of

publication:

. . . The abuses of the French revolution threw back many lovers of
reform upon prejudices, that were merely good as far as they were
opposed to worse: but every prejudice, essentially considered, is
bad, is prejudicial . . . We must shake off all our indolence, whether
positive or negative, whether of timidity or of negligence, we must
shake of all our prejudices, and look about us; and in this effort we
must be assisted by philosophy. (Examiner, 31 December 1808)

The issue of 22 March 1812, in which appeared an article that cost the
brothers two years’ imprisonment, consisted of 16 pages included
a 5-page report of Parliament, extracts from the London Gazette, edito-
rial articles, many news paragraphs, comments on the opera and on
pictures exhibited at the London Institution. It was the first article, ‘The
Prince on St. Patrick’s Day,’ which was to bring the authorities’ wrath
down on the paper. It was reported that at the annual St. Patrick’s Day,

The Language of Newspapers

the toast of ‘The health of the Prince regent’ was ‘drunk with partial
applause, and loud and reiterated hisses.’ . . . The article, after con-
temptuous reference to the ‘sickening adulation’ of the Prince Regent in
the Morning Post, went on:

What person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would
imagine, in reading these astounding eulogies, that this ‘Glory of
the People’ was the subject of shrugs and reproaches! – that this
‘Protector of the Arts’ had named a wretched foreigner his historical
painter, in disparagement or in ignorance of the merits of his own
country men! . . . that this ‘Exciter of desire’ (bravo! Mesieurs of the
Post! – this ‘Adonis in loveliness’ was a corpulent man of fifty! In
short, that this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable,
virtuous, true, and immortal prince, was a violator of his word, a
libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties,
the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just
closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of
his country, or the respect of posterity!

The Examiner constituted a more cerebral form of radical opposition
than that of Spence before Cobbett, Wooler and Hetherington later in
the century, lacking as it did a robust vernacular engagement with the
broader political interests and activities of working people. The lan-
guage of the live political platform was something which rather connects
the rhetoric of Paine to that of Cobbett. The radical movement demanded
a democracy of representation as well as a democracy of expression
(Calhoun, 1982: 89) and it was to be the unstamped journals and news-
papers which provided what Thompson has termed the ‘heroic age of
popular radicalism’ (1967: 660).

William Cobbett: Forging a people’s journalism

Cobbett had little of the philosophical sophistication of Paine or classi-
cal allusion of the Hunts but he provided a template for radical political
journalism which was even more influential in its way than his prede-
cessors. Patricia Hollis has summarized the main thrust of this
radicalism as being based on a critique of ‘old corruption’ (1970). This
analysis concentrated on the abuse of power by politicians and the
abuse of working people. The ‘older rhetoric’ highlighted the corrup-
tion at the heart of the political system and essentially expressed the
problems of society in terms of the inadequacies of powerful and
wealthy individuals. The rhetoric of the ‘old corruption’ was shared by
middle class and working-class radicals of the time and drew on folk
memory and the oral tradition of the Free Born Englishman established
in the wake of the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution. Harrison

Radical Rhetoric

indicates that after the impact of the French Revolution on popular
political aspirations and in the maelstrom of industrialization, it was
no surprise that the first champion of popular rights should be articu-
lated in such a ‘yeomanly’ figure as Cobbett for it was precisely the
values of the rural artisan and traditional culture, in its broadest defini-
tion as a whole way of life, that the actions of a new mercantile and
political elite seemed to be threatening (Harrison, 1974: 43). Nor, for the
same reasons, is it any surprise that the voice which articulated this
‘older rhetoric’ should do so in a way which called on established
traditions of a common English identity. Williams writes that what
the nineteenth century brought was, with Cobbett, ‘a new kind of
campaigning political journalism’ (Williams, 1978: 47). He returned to
the tradition of the political essay but used it to provide an entirely
new point of attack on privilege from the unshakeable perspective of
empathy with the underdog in desperately hard economic times:

I, as far as I am convinced, am quite willing to trust to the talent, the
justice and the loyalty of the great mass of the people . . . I am quite
willing to make common cause with them, to be one of them.
(Cobbett’s Political Register (CPR), No. 31, 24 April 1819)

For Cobbett just as for Paine, ‘truth in clear language’ (CPR, No. 18,
1810: October 10) was the first priority of the radical author and it was
a language which made full use of direct address to the people of its
sympathy as well as in its hostility, providing a ‘blunt simplicity of
appeal to the masses’ (Herd, 1952: 103) which was the chief character-
istic of his writing:

Will nothing, oh people of England, short of destruction itself,
convince you that you are on the road to destruction? Will you, in
spite of the awful admonition of events, in spite of experimental
conviction, in spite of truths that you acknowledge, still listen to
the falsehoods of your deceivers? (CPR, No. 9, 1 March 1806)

Indeed, this direct address and the presumed bond of solidarity which
flowed from it formed a central part of the structuring of his political
thought. Thompson goes so far as to claim that ‘Cobbett’s thought was
not a system but a relationship’ with his audience (1967: 758). This was
expressed as a practical engagement with the people he met on his
travels throughout the land and in his ability to embrace the issues they
raised with him in straightforward language. His reference to his ‘read-
ers or hearers’ in his Political Register shows how the reading of
unstampeds was above all an activity that working-class persons per-
formed as members of a newly demotic public sphere (Wickwar, 1928:
54). He began to conflate discussions of class and language and encour-
aged readers to see that limitations on the abilities of people to engage

The Language of Newspapers

in debate about politics in everyday language was an integral part
of a social system which he was calling upon them to change (Smith,
1984: 110).

Much of the appeal of Cobbett’s writing lay in the ways he drew

upon a common cultural archive for his narratives of an older, more
harmonious England; a nation more at peace with itself and one which
could demonstrate more patriotic pride in its singularity and achieve-
ments particularly in its rural idylls as ‘. . . an accumulated vocabulary
of motifs, tropes, and epithets . . . a sustained relationship to other
forms of rural representation’ (Helsinger, 1997: 104–105). These narra-
tives and their symbolic reference points would have been familiar to
most of the recently urbanized population as well as to the rural popu-
lation itself. Many of the narratives of injustice for which Cobbett
became famous, drew on the patterns of broadsheets and ballads and
appealed to an already receptive audience because they connected with
the real life experiences of many of his readers and provided a reassur-
ing reformulation of a common store of folk memories. One of the most
important areas for this process of normative integration was in the dis-
course of the nation where Cobbett democratized historical vocabulary
by defining the nation as ‘the whole of the people’ (Dyck, 1992: 127)
confirming that Cobbett himself, even in his radical phase, remained
essentially a patriot. Despite the fact that he embodied the early-century
paradigm of the popular journalist as an opinionated, authoritative
voice of the people, he nevertheless expressed a force for cohesion in
British society based around the concept of a readership of printed mat-
ter as a national community with interests in common. Newspapers
had an important role in extending a sense of imagined continuity
across geographical space as a national community (Anderson, 1986)
which was to have implications for the way in which popular periodi-
cal discourse came to be articulated throughout the century.

Cobbett was able to widen his readership, not only because he

employed a vernacular which attempted to popularize politics so that
the ordinary people could make sense of the dramatic changes of early-
nineteenth-century England, but also because he wrote in an idiom
which drew clearly on the traditions and speech patterns of popular
culture. His was a rhetoric which attempted and succeeded in bridging
the traditional and the radical and sought to bring that new community
together across a range of common interests. To this end, his writing
was full of the interruptions, ejaculations, emphases and conveyed the
strength of his feeling on particular topics by capital letters, exclama-
tion and question marks, breaking:

the usual decorum (that is, among the middle and upper classes) of
formal spoken or written English . . . the flow of the text is broken

Radical Rhetoric

up by what is heard as the abrupt rise and fall of emphatically
inflected speech and felt as the jerks and stabs of an equally
emphatic body language. (Helsinger, 1997: 133)

He understood that the common people had become politically aware
to the extent that they could no longer simply be preached at and that
in order to incorporate their support for resistance to the corruption in
English society, he had to find a voice with which they could become
identified. He was emphatic in not talking down to this readership but,
on the contrary, in highlighting its accumulated knowledge gained in
the lived experience of the times. Writing of the Bishop of Landoff’s
claim that Paine’s Age of Reason constituted an act of blasphemy,
Cobbett opined:

However, I am of the opinion that your Lordship is very much
deceived in supposing the People, or the vulgar, as you please to
call them, to be incapable of comprehending argument . . . The
People do not at all relish little simple tales. Neither do they delight
in declamatory language, or in loose assertion; their minds
have, within the last ten years, undergone a very great revolution.
(CPR, No. 21, 27 January 1820)

Cobbett was a traditionalist as well as a populist. He was a patriot as well
as being deeply resentful of the appropriation of the discourse of patrio-
tism by forces with which he disagreed. He was a paternalist whose
vision of rural self-sufficiency sat ill at ease with the industrializing
pressures of the day. He was radical to an extent but lacked the analyti-
cal insight which would have enabled him to transcend the restrictions
of the ‘old rhetoric’ yet Cobbett’s rhetoric provided a reservoir for politi-
cal journalism in the years to come whose cadences and bluntness can
certainly be detected in contemporary popular journalism.

Thomas Wooler: Parody and the popular

A very different contribution to the radical press from the sustained and
serious critical polemic of Cobbett and the Hunts came in Wooler’s Black
Dwarf (BD). The Black Dwarf 1817–1824 started as a 4 pence weekly
publication. By 1819 it had gained such notoriety that Castelreagh, the
Foreign Secretary, announced in Parliament that Wooler had become
the ‘fugleman of the Radicals’ and that his Black Dwarf could be found
in northern mining areas, ‘in the hatcrown of almost every pitman you
meet’ (Wickwar, 1928: 57).

The Black Dwarf was a provocative contribution to the radical news-

paper tradition, not only in its content but more especially in its style.
It contained a strong blend of satire, parody and humorous intervention

The Language of Newspapers

in support of Reform and the interests of the labouring classes. Drawing
on the popular culture of the working poor, poetry, ballads, songs were
all published in support of radical ideas and the culture they supported.
It blended with the oral nature of popular culture in its use of reported
speeches, quotations, questions, answers and parodies. His satire
remained very much within the ‘old corruption’ school – iconoclastic
and populist, developing a style of anti-authoritarianism with a strong
contemporary flavour. It offered little in explicit analysis but it pro-
vided a style which went beyond reporting and set the tone for political
debate among a new audience, a tone which was based on the ‘expanded
use of public satire . . .’ (Hendrix, 1976: 128). Its motto made this
explicit:

Satire’s my weapon; but I’m too discreet,
To run a-muck and tilt at all I meet:
POPE

Although it announced itself in this motto as following in the tradition
of the satirical model of Pope’s imitation of Horace’s satires, Wooler
was not interested in some polite critique of the foibles of society and
indeed did tilt at most everything that he met. The paper’s subtitle, the
‘Address to the Unrepresented Part of the Community’ makes clear both
the constituency his paper was aimed at, as well as stressing the fact
that in order to change society, this community had to become more
actively aware of their current situation:

. . . You are something, you are indeed; and although few dare tell
you what you are, you must perceive yourselves to be ‘slaves, on
whose chains are inscribed the words liberty and freedom!’ SLAVES?
Englishmen Slaves? You are startled, and well you may be, but it
should be at your condition, and not at the proclamation of it. Look
around you. Do, I beseech you, make use of your eyes. (BD: Vol. 2,
No. 27, 8 July 1818)

As in the example above, Wooler often employed devices based on an
approximation of oral patterns in order to appeal to readers and, no
doubt, listeners who would have had the paper read to them by a reader
drawing upon all its visual clues for intended delivery. Yet despite its
evident service to the radical movement encapsulated in its informa-
tional content, the most significant aspect of Wooler’s project was the
way in which he used his paper to play humorously with the conven-
tional forms of the newspaper itself. The novelty of the Black Dwarf’s
humorous engagement with politics from a radical stance was that it
highlighted the instability of established (and the Establishment’s)
forms of the newspaper as a forum for public information. In doing so,

Radical Rhetoric

it also made the most of the instability of contemporary readerships.
Klancher has observed that during these years it was the English
Romantics, sensing the turbulence of these times, who first became
radically uncertain of their readership and faced the task Wordsworth
referred to as ‘creating the taste’ by which the writer is comprehended
(Klancher, 1987: 3). At this moment, the English reading public was
experiencing the social and demographic turmoil of the industrial
revolution as a new social and political consciousness was being
created among the working class. Wooler exploited this to the full in
providing a complex range of voices and textual experiments to articu-
late that sense of change and uncertainty. Even his protagonist, the
Black Dwarf himself, was a symbol of mutability and radical unpredict-
ability of shape and form. He is described in the first edition by Wooler
as ‘secure from his invisibility, and dangerous from his power of divi-
sion, (for like the polypus, he can divide and redivide himself, and each
division remain a perfect animal)’ (BD: Vol. 1, No. 1, 29 January 1817).

The instability of the ‘polymorph’ is reflected in the highly volatile

mixture of voices (heteroglossia) which Wooler uses to destabilize and
critique the ruling classes and their institutions and customs. One of
the chief targets of his comic strategies is the established newspaper
form which was continuing on its own way towards an economically
and politically acceptable truce with the status quo. Bakhtin has stressed
the importance of orientating one’s language in opposition to the domi-
nant discourse of the time, highlighting the dynamic nature of this
process:

Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into
the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated –
overpopulated – with the intentions of others. . . . Consciousness
finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of – having to choose a
language. With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness
must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and
occupy a position for itself within it, it chooses in other words, a
‘language’. (1996: 294–295)

Wooler uses this multiplicity of language and voice to demonstrate the
complexity of choice within which his readers were being invited to
take their place. The Black Dwarf, the Yellow Bonze, the Green Goblin,
the Black Neb and the Blue Devil all provide different voices and per-
spectives within which Wooler can confront and ridicule the corruption
of the status quo. This variety of voices, a literal heteroglossia, allows
Wooler to take up a whole spectrum of satirical and parodic positions
which would have been closed to the more traditional and literal
writing of Cobbett or Paine. Wooler was also adamant that the variety of

The Language of Newspapers

textual voices had to be complemented by genuine dialogue among his
readers:

It is only in communion with his fellows, that man rises to the full
importance of his being . . . He, who only reads in his closet, may be
very well informed, and yet very useless . . . To be important, men must
meet each other, unite their knowledge and their powers, compare
their sentiments, weigh together the force of opposite statements –
and draw the pure gold of truth from the dross of the inferior ore with
which it is generally combined. (BD: Vol. 3, No. 3, January 1819)

Wooler deployed a wide range of journalism’s repertoire for comic/
disruptive effect ‘reporting’ ‘foreign correspondents’ ‘political dis-
course’, ‘reports of trials’, ‘poetry’ and ‘readers’ letters’ were all used to
destabilize and force reflection on the purpose of journalism and its
relationship to those in power. However, ultimately, even the heroic
efforts of Wooler to invigorate the cause of reform were exhausted by
the declining fortune of radical papers in the wake of increased taxa-
tion and surveillance of the radical press after 1819 (Wood, 1994: 13).
He is writing from an apparent trough of despondency in the last copy
of his paper in 1824 in his ‘Final Address’:

In ceasing his political labours, the Black Dwarf has to regret one
mistake, and that a serious one. He commenced writing under the
idea that there was a PUBLIC in Britain, and that public devotedly
attached to the cause of parliamentary reform. This, it is but candid
to admit, was an error. (BD: Vol. 12, No. 21, December 1824)

The Six Acts: Reaction and reconfiguration

In 1819 the introduction by Parliament of the ‘Six Acts’ severely
curtailed the activities of the radical press. They included a Blasphemous
and Seditious Libels Act and also made it necessary for bonds of £200–
£300 to be paid over to the authorities in surety before a paper could be
published, in order to ensure that the press was in the hands of respect-
able, politically responsible owners. This legislation, combined with
an improvement in economic conditions and the execution of the Cato
Street conspirators, ensured the decline of overt political radicalism in
the short term (McCalman, 1998: 181).

Complementary to this suppression, the radical popular press was

rapidly incorporated and eventually transformed, through the regular
publication of periodicals of sensational entertainment. The Terrific
Register, started in 1821, with woodcuts and stories of ‘Crimes, Judge-
ments, Providences and Calamities’, provided little change from
popular reading of centuries past in the almanacs, broadsides and

Radical Rhetoric

ballads which had been eschewed by the respectable press as a market-
able commodity for so long. Its difference lay in its regular publication.
In addition, there was the economically astute construction of the
popular Sunday press as entertainment papers such as Bell’s Weekly
Messenger began publication from 1822. Sunday papers were ideal for
the workers who could not afford the price of the daily newspapers and
who because of the long hours and the lack of artificial evening light in
their accommodation were unable to read apart from on a Sunday, their
day of rest.

In addition to legislative measures and market alternatives, there

were increased efforts to provide a style of popular periodical which
might combine an appeal to working people with a less radical compo-
nent. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded
in 1826 to help in the creation of a more content worker. From 1827 this
was complemented by a Library of Useful Knowledge as a fortnightly
collection of pieces on a range of topics from Greek literature to popular
science. The contents and aspirations of such publications were patron-
izing and largely irrelevant to their targeted readers as was highlighted
by the Westminster Review of April 1831. To combat such criticisms, in
1832 Charles Knight launched the Penny Magazine in an attempt to
broaden the work of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
(SDUK) and reach the lower orders with useful knowledge and thereby
rescue them from sedition and political corruption. This fulfilled the
ambition he had expressed in the London Magazine of April 1828 that
working people having been taught to read and consequently to think
had loosed a new power in society and this ‘could not be stopped
although it might be given direction’ (Harrison, 1974: 101). Circulation
reached 200,000 but despite this success, the SDUK was dissolved, in
1846, shortly after the discontinuation of the Penny Magazine in 1845
with its considered work done and its objectives achieved (Jones, 1996:
107). A complementary reason for this was no doubt that a more genu-
inely popular form of popular periodical and the Sunday newspaper
had started to take their place, and most importantly for the govern-
ment, one divested of genuinely radical politics.

The second phase of unstamped newspapers

It has been said that in the nineteenth century, ‘the image of the news-
paper as a harbinger, or indeed the active agent, of change exerted a
powerful hold over the contemporary imagination’ (Jones, 1996: xi).
This had much to do with the increasing ability of many newspapers to
match their language and content to the interests of particular classes of
people, particularly those actively seeking social change. A second

The Language of Newspapers

wave of radical, unstamped periodicals responded to further political
and economic convulsions in the 1830s. These working-class unstam-
peds may be divided into three main ideological trends: pragmatic,
utopian and confrontational (Chalaby, 1998: 19) and all varieties dif-
fered from earlier radical journals in that they gave news, in the
government definition of the word, as they reported and commented on
each stage in the Reform Bill struggle (Harrison, 1974: 81). Yet it was in
the language of the confrontational newspapers where we most clearly
see the analysis of a ‘new rhetoric’ (Hollis, 1970) which aimed to tran-
scend individual articulations of grievances to be found in ‘old
corruption’ analyses and to provide a proto-socialist analysis of the
position of working people within the economic system of industrial
capitalism and particularly within the structures of property owner-
ship. This rhetoric contributed to an emergent understanding of social
class by going beyond simplistic dichotomies of virtuous working
people and the wicked rich in attempting to develop an understanding
of the systemic causes of popular discontent. Their titles declared their
intent: The Crisis, The Prompter, The Destructive, The Republican, The
Working Man’s Friend. The middle class radicals were on the point of
inheriting the benefits of the Reform Act of 1832 but the confronta-
tional working class radicals looked to their press as an instrument to
militate for deeper political and economic changes. These unstamped
newspapers raised the political awareness of the dominated classes by
using language and recurrent themes which drew upon the political
experience of these readers: ‘by putting feelings into words, by express-
ing grievances, by proposing political modes of actions and economic
solutions, by giving hope and by organizing the political activities and
political life as a whole of the working classes’ (Chalaby, 1998: 18–19).

Hetherington’s Penny Papers for the People from 1 October 1830

was closely associated from the start with the National Union of the
Working Classes and was soon renamed the Poor Man’s Guardian
(PMG). Its opening editorial declared:

It is the cause of the rabble we advocate, the poor, the suffering, the
industrious, the productive classes . . . We will teach this rabble
their power – we will teach them that they are your master, instead
of being your slaves.

The Poor Man’s Guardian was notable for the hundreds of letters
(Harrison, 1974: 83) which helped establish a communicative channel
between paper and readers at the same time as its editors sought to
elaborate a radical social and political critique. A perfect illustration of
its attempt to supplement this communicative strategy by deploying
a new rhetoric focused on the structural inequalities within social

Radical Rhetoric

practice, comes from a colleague and supporter of Hetherington’s
political analysis, Bronterre O’Brien, popularizing the thought of con-
temporary economic analyst, Hodgskin, writing in a passage typical of
this new analytical style:

Now, since all wealth is the produce of industry, and as the privi-
leged fraction produce nothing themselves, it is plain that they
must live on the labours of the rest. But how is this to be done, since
every body thinks it enough to work for himself? It is done partly by
fraud and partly by force. The ‘property’ people having all the law-
making to themselves, make and maintain fraudulent institutions,
by which they contrive (under false pretences) to transfer the wealth
of the producers to themselves. (PMG, 26 June 1834)

O’Brien’s Destructive confronted the liberal intentions of the SDUK and
suggested that the provision of provocative information liable to over-
throw the system should be the purpose of his paper on 7 June 1834:

Some simpletons talk of knowledge as rendering the working
classes more obedient, more dutiful . . . But such knowledge is
trash; the only knowledge which is of any service to the working
people is that which makes them more dissatisfied and makes them
worse slaves. This is the knowledge we shall give them.

Such papers were in the process of creating a new class identity and
despite their short-lived careers, they were laying the foundations for
the newspapers of the Chartist movement and also, in many ways, pro-
viding further sophistication to the tradition and appeal of radical
journalism. However, their radical intent needs to be understood in a
broader context. These unstamped newspapers made money and pro-
vided the platform for the development of a popular press which had a
role in defining the printed manifestation of the interests of the work-
ing classes of Britain. It was, in fact, their commercial success which
encouraged the development of a particular style of popular press from
the Chartist movement onwards. James has observed the paradox of
this incorporation of the popular into a commercial paradigm: ‘The
Radical press was . . . forced out by the popularity of the very cheap
literature it had helped to establish’ (James, 1976: 36). Within the logic
of a liberal print economy, any popular press which restricted itself to
a purely political role would ultimately lose out against a more com-
mercially orientated popularity. The radical press, even as it became
increasingly commercialized, lost its potential to rival the increasingly
broad appeal of the Sunday and later daily popular press within such a
commercial environment. If a paper claimed to speak for the people,
this could only be legitimated if in fact it had a wide enough circulation
to interest advertisers. Increasingly, the newspapers able to achieve

The Language of Newspapers

such circulations did so through developing broader approaches than
the more narrowly, didactically popular-political. They returned in
many ways to previous patterns of popular print culture which had
already become established as having a wide general appeal. They
included a diverse range of content including sensation and the serial-
ization of novels in their efforts to capture the broadest coalition of
popular taste although one subjugated to an overarching profit motive.
As if to confirm this trend, Hetherington consequently altered his
approach to content in his publication, the Destructive, which in June
1834 proclaimed that it would:

. . . henceforward be a repository of all the gems and treasures, and
fun and frolic and ‘news and occurrences’ of the week. It shall
abound in Police Intelligences, in Murders, Rapes, Suicides,
Burnings, Maimings, Theatricals, Races, Pugilism, and all manner
of moving ‘accidents by flood and field’. In short it will be stuffed
with every sort of devilment that will make it sell.

Heatherington, and more successfully, Cleave, in his Weekly Police
Gazette (1834) were able to bring together aspects of the radical opin-
ion of the Unstamped and the profitability of their formats at a price
which would challenge the supremacy, on the one hand, of the street
literature and peddled broadsides and, on the other, the comfortable
superiority of the middle-class papers and the class these represented.
To an extent, the new popular papers were able to claim a growing
political legitimacy, despite their sometimes ambivalent intentions,
simply on the strength of their widespread readership which took them
beyond the reach of a social minority. As soon as the popular press was
able to perfect this formula, it would appear that its democratic creden-
tials, albeit limited in scope, were established. Hollis concludes that
ultimately the new radicals failed to replace the older rhetoric with the
new (Hollis, 1970: vii). The emerging working class could not be
reduced to one function or one aspiration. A popular press henceforth
had to allow for a more dialogic interplay between the genres of infor-
mation and entertainment and the economic environment created
pressure for such a resolution to be found. James argues that it was to a
large extent radical journalism which cemented the disparate experi-
ences and practices of the working classes into a sense of class solidarity
while acknowledging that there was, even within this formation a
divide between those who wanted to read for entertainment and those
who wanted to read as a political activity (James, 1976: 22). Clearly,
anything which was able to cross between these modes of appeal could
begin to draw maximum commercial returns from a considerable read-
ing public.

Radical Rhetoric

Market compromises: Popular tastes

There were two quite distinct responses to the political radicalism of
the unstamped, the respectable and the scurrilous. The respectable
publications included Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal, Penny Magazine
of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and The Saturday
Magazine all published in 1832 and all seeking to supply the demand
for instruction and entertainment evinced by the success of the Sunday
papers but in more wholesome ways. Despite their initial success, it
was the scurrilous variety which were to have the more lasting and
influential popular appeal in terms of its impact upon the parameters
of the language of the popular newspaper, and ultimately on the news-
paper in general.

The bawdy and the politically subversive had long shared a net-

work of profitable illegality (McCalman, 1998) so it was no surprise
that they came to blend their approaches to enhance their popular
appeal. Benbow exploited older traditions of scandal and aristocratic
corruption (Darnton, 1996) to produce his Rambler’s Magazine of
1822. He expanded the scope of his publication to provide more of
general appeal to the working classes and this revised agenda extended
from sport and criminal trials to popular literature and radical poli-
tics. The sexual element of Benbow’s publication was commercially
moderated in 1833 by Penney, a stationer by trade, who was confident
enough of the market to bring out his broadsheet People’s Police
Gazette. It was filled with police news and court reports and quickly
achieved a circulation of 20,000 (Harrison, 1974: 94). Following suit,
from 1834, two of the unstamped publishers produced broadsheets
of their own Hetherington’s Twopenny Dispatch and Cleave’s Weekly
Police Gazette which was to have an impact on the development of
crime content in popular daily newspapers in the United States.
McCalman (1998: 236) argues that it is in the blend of the language of
shocking exposé of the sexual corruption of the upper classes with the
equally shocking political corruption of politicians that these publi-
cations began to refashion the tastes of the English working-class
reader from a political and class-conscious phase of the 1820s and
1830s to a more escapist, insubordinate yet apolitical form by the
1870s. The Sunday weekly newspapers were to provide the melting
pot in which the new culture would be born out of the old.

The voice of provincial radicalism

Provincial newspapers also continued to develop dialogues with their
readers and acted as disseminators of reformist opinion on a local level

The Language of Newspapers

(Read, 1961: 62). The Manchester Guardian launched on Saturday,
5 May 1821, modelled on provincial middle-class reform newspapers
such as the Leeds Mercury and the Liverpool Mercury carried editorial
articles and reports from public meetings from the start. The political
theory of Jeremy Bentham, for example, was accepted in its most demo-
cratic form:

we maintain, that in forming our opinion with respect to parlia-
mentary reform, all we have to do, is to ascertain whether it is for
the advantage of the people (‘The universal interest’, as Bentham
well designates them), that it should take place. Its effects, either
upon the king or the house of peers, are matters of merely second-
ary importance. (Manchester Guardian, 7 September 1822)

During the Reform Bill crisis, Harland, its chief reporter, took down
details which according to Read (1961): ‘retained all the vigour, and
colour of the speeches . . . first person reporting such as had rarely been
known before in the provincial press: vigorous language authentically
recorded’:

I have no language adequate to express the dread I feel of their
rejecting it – I have no nerve to reflect upon the consequences of
such a course – and sure I am that if they do reject it, not only will
their own order be endangered, but everything that is valuable in
this fine country. Gentlemen, I call upon you, as you value your
families, as you value your friends, as you wish to retain your prop-
erty, and, above all, as you love your country, to use all the influences
you possess (and every man does possess influence) to endeavour
to carry this great measure which I cannot but denominate the char-
ter of your rights. (Manchester Guardian, 24 September 1831)

To counter the sell-out of the working classes in the Reform Act of 1832,
Chartism was born. The six points of the Charter, published in May
1838 could be summarized as: universal [male] suffrage, annual parlia-
ments, voting by ballot, the creation of equal electoral districts, the
abolition of property qualification for voting, the payment of members
of parliament. The vitality of the language of political debate was widely
disseminated by the provincial press, especially when it became in cer-
tain cities allied to the cause of the Chartist movement. In the Chartist,
a full account is provided of a London meeting complete with the
interventions of the audience for added effect and one senses, as an
amplification of the approval of the readership:

POOR LAW AMENDMENT ACT

On Monday a public meeting convened by the National Anti-
Poor Law Association, was held at the Freemasons’ Tavern, Great

Radical Rhetoric

Queen-street, Lincoln’s Inn-fields, for the purpose of deliberating
upon the means to be adopted to remedy the evils of the Poor Law
Amendment Act . . .
The noble CHAIRMAN, in opening the business of the day, said
the business they had to consider was whether the people would
continue to tolerate, without the strongest resistance, the arbitrary
power of the three directors of Somerset House, who would not
have been endured by our forefathers – a power unconstitutional in
its principle, and cruel and oppressive in its operation – (Cheers.)
Another question for their consideration was whether they would
preserve that which they had enjoyed for centuries and that which
they had greatly prized – the right of self-government – (Cheer)- a
right and principle which, as Englishmen, was dear to them, that of
expending their own money, and in a way which they thought
would most conduce to the welfare of their poorer neighbours –
(Cheers) . . . and would ask them whether or not they were willing
. . . that the relief should be dispensed according to the rules, orders,
and regulations of three despots at Somerset House? (Cheers and
cries of ‘No’.). (The Chartist, Sunday, 30 June 1839)

The Northern Star: A principled political voice

Provincial engagement with radical politics reaches its zenith in the
publication of the Northern Star (1837–1852) in Leeds. It was identifi-
ably a newspaper with all the range and variety that this had come to
represent; yet it provided, in addition, a steady and coherent expres-
sion of the principles of the Chartist cause. Its opening number of
Northern Star 18 November 1837 locates it firmly in opposition to the
mainstream press:

The silence of the Press upon all subjects connected with the move-
ment-party has been pointed and obvious; and, amongst others who
have anxiously endeavoured to serve the public cause, I have met
with marked indifference, and even insult, where it could be safely
hazarded . . . The power of the press is acknowledged upon all
hands, and rather than oppose it, I have preferred to arm myself
with it.

Epstein has commented that in fusing in his newspaper the functions
of ‘the powers of the press with those of the platform’ (Epstein, 1976:
51), Fergus O’Connor, the self-styled People’s Champion, was continu-
ing the tradition of William Cobbett. The tone of this organ was a written
version of the public assembly. It represented a didactic form of political
leadership aimed at bridging the gap between an oral and a written
political culture which clearly aimed to lead the people through the
complexities of contemporary politics with a rhetoric which claimed to

The Language of Newspapers

emanate from the people themselves but was, in fact, that of their
self-appointed champion, O’Connor. This aim was encapsulated in its
editor’s word from 1842:

I set myself, therefore, to see the people in possession of an organ
which, trumpet-tongued, might speak their will, and utter their
complaint. (Northern Star, 19 November 1842: 2)

Epstein observes that the language of the paper was ‘stridently
class-conscious . . . the razor-sharp rhetoric of class war’ (Epstein, 1976:
71). The Star could also claim the essential popular element of wide
appeal and therefore profitability, albeit within a particular social class,
claiming almost half a million readers by the end of the 1830s. How-
ever, its profits were ploughed back into agitation and the support of
political causes supported by the newspaper and involving the strug-
gles of working people. Certain techniques of the popular cheap press
were adopted such as woodcuts and steel-engraved portraits of heroes
of the Chartist movement while O’Connor also adapted to popular
tastes by an anecdotal style in his weekly letters which he wrote with
the keen ear for oral delivery of a skilled public orator practised in
addressing popular audiences in public places. O’Connor retained what
Thompson has called the Wilkesite tradition of gentlemanly leadership
to which the democratic movement still deferred (Thompson, 1967:
682) which would leave his paper open to criticism of speaking down
to its readership. Such a restrictive voice would eventually drive read-
ership to a more commercially oriented heteroglossia. Vincent points
out this process when he writes that the Northern Star was:

. . . too dependent on the position of its proprietor to escape the
negative aspects of the personalisation of address which had been
so characteristic of the working-class political papers. O’Connor’s
‘MY Dear Friends . . . had become “My Dear Children”’ by the time
of the Third Petition in 1848. (Vincent, 1993: 251)

Conclusion

Chalaby (1998: 16–18) has argued against using the term ‘journalists’
to describe these writers, preferring instead the word ‘publicists’ and
although there is a certain analytical correctness about the distinction
between their differing styles and functions, the publications of the
early and mid-nineteenth century did feed into developments within
language which helped to shape the language of newspapers for popu-
lar audiences. These periodicals served to open up the complexities of
social life beyond the interests of a narrowly politicized bourgeois class
and began the process of articulating the lives, passions and politics of

Radical Rhetoric

ordinary working people. The radical press of the early nineteenth
century performed a dual function by representing the people as well
as keeping them informed about matters in their interest and it did both
of these in a language which was close to their own spoken idiom.
These publications demonstrate how demotic language was able to
challenge the bourgeois hegemony within public communication open-
ing up a rival public sphere (Eley, 1992). Gilmartin has identified the
rich over-determination in the composition of the public sphere repre-
sented by the nineteenth-century radical press:

Its formal development must be understood in relation to the linked
histories of press restriction, print technology, the economics of
publishing, radical rhetoric and organization, and popular reading
habits. (Gilmartin, 1996: 75)

This point echoes the observation made earlier in the book that the
products and practices of newspaper language have always been in a
struggle for dominance with other rival discourses and definitions.
Williams (1978) insists that journalism should not be narrated from the
standpoint of what it became as if that were somehow inevitable and
historically neutral. Newspapers and their language were in a continu-
ous process of formation against a whole range of competing political,
cultural and textual practices.

Introduction

The nineteenth century saw several profound changes to the language
of newspapers. These took place in the context of the consolidation of
the political influence and economic stature of the Times; the subse-
quent development of newspapers to rival this dominance which sought
to discover alternative ways of reaching an affluent middle class; the
generation of a market for weekly newspapers aimed at a working-class
readership; the post-telegraph shift in the flow and organization of
language within newspaper institutions. Early changes in the mid-
century were partly driven by an extension in the franchise which
allowed a widening section of the public to vote and partly by an
increasing commercialization which encouraged a marketing of news-
papers for much more explicit and socially based readerships than had
previously been available. The first electoral change came with the
Reform Act of 1832. Its effect was to increase the numbers of propertied
middle-class voters and these immediately became a target of newspa-
pers directed towards a readership freshly interested in parliamentary
proceedings as well as commerce and general news. The diversifying
social base of newspaper readerships were provided for by new devel-
opments throughout the century such as the illustrated weeklies,
Sunday papers, political and cultural quarterlies and later, more popu-
lar-based monthlies, daily evening newspapers and the eventual
targeting of the lower middle classes. These were all accompanied by
the pursuit of a variety of languages of identification aimed at establish-
ing commercially viable print communities.

The market orientation of newspapers

It was after the final lifting of taxes on newspapers in 1855 that the style
and content of the newspaper began to consistently address the social
specifics of its readers within a liberal market economy. Politicians
were proved correct that newspapers would subsequently be increas-
ingly accountable to the views of the respectable classes of society
through the market and would therefore be less politically partisan

Shaping the social market

Shaping the Social Market

because of their dependence on the business of advertisers and the
desire of readers for reliable and impartial information. The market
mood became attuned to encourage broadly liberal newspapers after
1855 (Curran, 1978). These provided liberal hegemonic positions
broadly favourable to the political status quo and as a consequence
were commercially attractive in their broad-based appeal. They further
extended this appeal with a corresponding miscellany in content which
was becoming the dominant pattern within newspapers. This matched
a particularly influential philosophical discourse of the time which
asserted a preference for a free market of ideas determined within a
competitive economic market (Mill, 1989: 19–55).

The word ‘journalism’ entered the English language via an article in

the Westminster Review (1833) and Campbell (2000) provides a persua-
sive explanation that this neologism signalled an attempt to delineate a
style of writing which narrowed down previously existing divisions
between high culture and popular culture. Indeed, she claims that jour-
nalism played a prominent part in the formation of the language of
modernity since the term ‘journalism’ was introduced in order to
account for the characteristic tensions which newspapers brought into
the public arena, as they located their appeal between elite and popular
knowledge. From this moment onwards, the momentum of the language
of newspapers was driven inexorably by a process of popularization.
By popularization, we mean the production of news which was aimed
at larger and larger numbers of readers and which claimed to espouse
their political and social interests. It was a process which also shifted
from the ambition of providing enlightenment for a specific readership
to one of imagining and therefore representing that readership (Hampton,
2004). This led to extensive experimentation with editorial style and
attempts to create distinctive identities for newspapers as each sought
to establish a regular readership within an increasingly competitive
environment. These editorial identities provided a much broader range
than those fostered in the late eighteenth century.

While daily newspapers increased their appeal to middle-class

audiences, Sunday newspapers took up the mantle of being representa-
tives of the working classes with a judicious blend of sensation,
entertainment and radical perspectives on the interests of the working
classes, although securely harnessed within a commercially acceptable
format. Both these forms of newspaper developed their own, distinct
styles of writing but it would be the popular end of the market which,
as it tried to find ways of appealing to a more generalist and less explic-
itly politicized readership, would move the style of journalism towards
what we have come to know as its dominant style. The weekly Sunday
newspapers, with their huge popular readerships, were to provide

The Language of Newspapers

the driving momentum of journalism through their increasing harmo-
nization of miscellany, entertainment, melodramatic narrative and
contemporary news.

From the early Victorian period, with newspapers more accepted

within the social and political mainstream as commercial products,
addressed to general rather than politically motivated readers, the
writing of journalists started to become more distinguishable from other
forms of literary output. According to (Elliott, 1978) the journalist
started the long climb towards political, if not social, respectability in
the nineteenth century. This, however, was a slow process over the
course of the nineteenth century (Brake, 1994), and leading politicians
and contemporary philosophers contributed to, as well as edited, news-
papers and periodicals. This distinction was gradually eroded as the
role of journalists became more accepted as a specialist component in
the negotiation of social and political trends to expanding readerships.
This necessitated the evolution of various styles of language driven by
the growing specialization within newspapers as editorials, feature
articles, background commentaries, the report from various specialists
covering sporting events, politics and the court started to drift apart
stylistically after 1855.

The social orientation of newspapers to different markets meant that

newspapers developed strategies within their language to bring various
constituents within one discursive pattern. Political reports, general
news, low-life crime, scandal, advertising and editorials, to name but a
few of the varieties contained in the early Victorian press, needed to be
framed within a unified editorial approach determined by specific mar-
ket appeal. Earlier, both radical and liberal newspapers and periodicals
had tended towards a political public and a drawing together of publics
as homogenous groupings motivated in particular by issues such as
reliability of commercial information, accurate political reporting, the
extension of the franchise and the rights of working people. From 1855,
their language was increasingly designed to appeal to specific parts of
a commercial market identifiable by leisure, class, profession and
income. The changes in newspapers from having a predominantly
political function to a commercial one were dramatically accelerated
by the lifting of taxes on newspapers in 1855. These developments
formed part of what has been termed, ‘the transition from a public to a
journalistic discourse’ (Chalaby, 1998: 66). Chalaby goes on to claim
that from this point, ‘journalism can be considered as the commodified
form of public discourse’.

It has been remarked that the newspaper press moved into the

centre of British life during the course of the nineteenth century ( Jones,
1996: xi) and was set to dominate over the sermon and the public

Shaping the Social Market

meeting as a generalized disseminator of information and opinion by
the end of the century. As such, it was also a prime social barometer
and the language of these newspapers came increasingly to act as a key
element in social differentiation. One of the consequences flowing from
the increasingly commercialized social market for newspapers was that
readerships were being defined according to: ‘. . . broad bands of class
stratification . . .’ (Lee, 1976: 19). In political discussions of how news-
papers engaged with their readers, Hampton argues that two analytically
distinct approaches predominated: ‘educational’, a commitment to try-
ing to ‘influence’ readers of the truth or common good and a contrasting
‘representative’ approach by newspapers reflecting the already-existing
opinions and tastes of readers (Hampton, 2001: 214). As a complement
to the break in discursive patternings identified above (Chalaby, 1998),
post 1855, this shift from ‘educational’ to ‘representative’ is the second
decisive discursive shift within the nineteenth-century newspaper’s
language.

The fourth estate as political legitimation

Journalism’s rise to a level of political and social legitimacy was based
on the establishment of its profitable commercial status which enabled
newspapers to become independent of political control. Their journal-
ism was often hailed as a Fourth Estate although this was neither a
consistent nor absolutely clear set of practices. The claim to constitute
a Fourth Estate was however a fundamental aspect to the discursive
formation of journalism. The language of newspapers becomes struc-
tured as a discourse in Foucault’s terms (1974) as it provides an
expression of the dominant values in society while allowing powerful
new forms of social identification through those values. As we have
seen in the introductory chapter in this book, the legitimation of jour-
nalism was able to present itself as a powerful form of control over the
political establishment, a Fourth Estate of the realm, while establishing
itself as an equally powerful form of social control on behalf of
commercial self-interest. In the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers in
particular had already become too dependent on advertising and
economic stability to want to seriously consider challenging the politi-
cal establishment, yet journalism was able through its self-claimed
status as Fourth Estate to provide an important rhetorical bridge between
the economic interests of the newspapers and the self-interest of the
newly enfranchised British middle classes. Both sets of activities,
middle-class involvement in politics and the establishment of profit-
able and independent newspapers, claimed legitimacy through this
connection and through it forged one of the most historically resilient

The Language of Newspapers

claims of newspaper journalism. Much of the ‘ideological baggage’
(Boyce, 1978: 19) of the Fourth Estate becomes attached to journalism’s
descriptions and expectations of itself from this point. Jones argues that
it retained a powerful role within journalism throughout the nineteenth
century (Jones, 1996: 12–13). A good example of this comes from the
Times’ leader writer, Reeve, outlining the trajectory of politically inter-
ventionist journalism from Junius to the mid-Victorian era:

Junius . . . set the example of that union of accurate and secret
political information, consummate ability, daring liberty, and pun-
gent and racy style, which has ever since distinguished the highest
organs of the newspaper press. (Reeve, 1855: 472)

The Times: A paradigm of political influence

The discourse of the Fourth Estate was founded within a journalistic
landscape which had been largely cleared of alternatives which were
not market-based. The journalism which flourished was unequivocally
a branch of commerce and this was reinforced by the triple pressures of
technology, capital and distribution. Technological innovations came
at a cost and newspaper ownership became restricted to those who
could invest in equipment and property as well as coordinate the
logistical organization required to exploit the growing railway network
as a distribution channel. With increasing capitalization came the need
to provide more specialist roles within a newspaper as the jobs of
reporters, printers, advertising sales people, editors and specialist
correspondents became demarcated and formalized. To support such
changes in the structure of newspapers, the requirements for large sums
of capital investment meant a greater dependence than ever on circula-
tion combined with advertising revenue. The Times was the paper
which established the most dominant early form of this market-
orientated independent journalism.

Already successful as part of the Walters’ publishing business, it

was under the editorship of Thomas Barnes (1817–1841) that it started
its move to its position of dominance. Under Barnes, it ‘was vastly
improved as a newspaper, in the sense of a collector and retailer of
information’ (Fox-Bourne, 1998, Vol. 2: 110). He ensured that it drew
on an extensive range of public opinion through a nationwide network
of correspondents and was able to channel this astutely into leading
articles which took on impressive resonance as reflections of elite opin-
ion among the bourgeoisie. This network was extended to international
sources to supplement information from domestic informants in order
to turn the newspaper into a much more complete purveyor and proc-
essor of news and one which was increasingly able to reflect critically

Shaping the Social Market

and with authority upon that news. As early as 16 August 1819, the
Times was testing its newly minted liberal credentials in its coverage of
Peterloo which incidentally was one of the first events to be covered
live by newspaper reporters in any great number. The Times subse-
quently established an early reputation for political pragmatism as a
key component of this brand of respectable journalism as identified by
Hazlitt:

The Times fights no uphill battle, advocates no great principle,
holds out a helping hand to no oppressed or obscure individual; it
is ‘ever strong upon the stronger side;’ its style is magniloquent, its
spirit is not magnanimous . . . Stuffed with official documents, with
matter-of-fact details, it might be imagined to be composed, as well
as printed, with a steam-engine . . . It sells more, and contains more,
than any other paper, and when you have said this you have said
all. (Edinburgh Review, May 1823: 362–364)

The combination of John Walter II’s business enterprise and Barnes
editorial skills established the newspaper’s reputation. Barnes recruited
and remunerated the best writers including Edward Sterling, the leader
writer who penned the celebrated article which gained the nickname
‘The Thunderer’ for the paper. Harrison has pointed out that it had been
a staunch supporter of the oligarchy but moved strategically from 1830
in step with the liberal sentiments of its readers (Harrison, 1974: 99), to
support the Reform Bill in language which has resonated down the
years. On 29 January 1831 Stirling wrote, in support of voting reform
proposals for the propertied middle classes:

unless the people – the people everywhere – come forward and
petition, ay thunder for reform, it is they who abandon an honest
Minister – it is not the Minister who betrays the people.

Francis Williams has commented of the dominance and influence of
the Times that it was by the mid-century:

a towering Everest of a newspaper with sales ten times those of any
other daily, combining leadership in circulation, in news services
especially of the most confidential and exclusive kind – in advertis-
ing revenue, commercial profit and political influence to an extent
no other newspaper anywhere in the world has ever done before or
since. (1957: 100)

To complement this commercial dominance, the Times took on the
mantle as a spokespiece for assertive journalism. It was established as
the ‘Jove of the press’ (Andrews, 1998, Vol. 2: 209) when in 1852 it was
able to clarify, on its own terms, the respective roles and responsibili-
ties of the press and statesmen. In response to Lord Derby in the Times

The Language of Newspapers

on 6 and 7 February 1852, it outlined its own vision of a fully indepen-
dent Fourth Estate:

The press lives by disclosures; whatever passes into its keeping
becomes a part of the knowledge and history of our times; it is daily
and for ever appealing to the enlightened force of public opinion –
anticipating, if possible, the march of events – standing upon the
breach between the present and the future, and extending its survey
to the horizon of the world. The statesman’s duty is precisely the
reverse. He cautiously guards from the public eye the information
by which his actions and opinions are regulated; he reserves his
judgement on passing events till the latest moment, and then he
records it in obscure or conventional language; he strictly confines
himself, if he be wise, to the practical interests of his own country,
or to those bearing immediately upon it; he hazards no rash sur-
mises as to the future; and he concentrates in his own transactions
all that power which the press seeks to diffuse over the world. The
duty of the one is to speak; of the other to be silent.

Its role in domestic politics was soon to be enhanced by a growing
reputation for an ability to convey the latest and best information from
abroad, deploying its networks of reporters and agents to bring news
back from the war in the Crimea from 1854 quicker than government
communications could manage. William Howard Russell had first come
to prominence reporting the Irish potato famine in 1845 and 1846 and
was to bring regular, colourful, eyewitness accounts of foreign wars to
readers’ breakfast tables for the first time and more importantly a critical
eye able to shift public opinion on the state of the armed forces and the
conduct of their leaders in war. He covered the Crimean and subsequently
the American Civil War, the Austro-Prussian War 1866 and the Franco-
Prussian war 1870–1871. Delane was able to exploit this coverage to lend
increased authority to his leading articles as in this example:

The noblest army ever sent from these shores has been sacrificed to
the grossest mismanagement. Incompetency, lethargy, aristocratic
hauteur, official indifference, favour, routine, perverseness, and stu-
pidity reign, revel and riot in the camp before Sebastopol, in the
harbour of Balaklava, in the hospital of Scutari, and how much nearer
home we do not venture to say. (The Times, 23 December 1854)

Among other things, it was the achievements of the Times during the
Crimean War which enabled it to emerge as the champion of enlight-
ened patriotic opinion and this was endorsed by much critical
discussion among the influential quarterlies of the era:

Ministers, even by their own admission, learned the state of affairs
in the Crimea sooner, more fully, and more faithfully, through the

Shaping the Social Market

columns of the daily journals than from their own dispatches.
(Reeve, 1855: 483)

The Crimean War was significant for the development of the newspaper
in the way it demonstrated a material political power. The Times con-
tributed directly to the fall of a government, the creation of the post of
Secretary of State for War, and the intervention of Florence Nightingale
which was to alter public perceptions of the rights of wounded combat-
ants to medical support. Russell established that the occupation of a
reporter was to go and find out what is happening, which is the basic
premise of investigative journalism (De Burgh, 2000: 34). Increasingly,
its news was characteristic of a time of great imperial confidence,
reflecting that ‘. . . the standpoint of the reader was assumed to be that
of someone with a serious concern for the affairs of a world power’
(Brown, 1985: 111). Yet despite its undoubted authority in foreign cor-
respondence, the prestige of the Times was based on a completeness of
parliamentary reporting which would not survive as a model of news-
paper best practice for too long. In its desire to reinforce its reputation
as the provider of the best and most complete accounts of political
affairs, it would produce page after page of unbroken, verbatim speeches
from Parliament. This would soon provide the spur for other news-
papers to develop a differentiation between their content and their style
through the process of editing but for the moment, as the Times reigned
supreme, newspapers had not yet evolved a style distinct from their
subject matter:

The news had not yet developed the textual apparatus of interview-
ing, summarizing, quoting and editing that would allow it to be
able to claim to represent reality . . . Even when papers’ reporters
gathered information themselves, the style was shaped by the
style of the topic of the text. The Times’ law reports, for example,
used a vocabulary and syntax strongly reminiscent of the courts.
(Matheson, 2000: 562–563)

Commercializing popular politics: Reynolds’s Weekly
Newspaper

Although sometimes related as the most important development in
nineteenth-century journalism, the Times was far from the whole story.
On 5 February 1836, the last conviction of an unstamped paper is
thought to have been of a police weekly when John Cleave was fined
500 pounds in the Court of the Exchequer for publishing five numbers
of a newspaper called the Weekly Police Gazette (Andrews (1998),
Vol. 2: 227), but from now on the official publication of crime news and

The Language of Newspapers

other forms of sensational story began to play a more prominent role in
nearly all newspapers.

The first successful mass newspapers in England were the Sunday

newspapers. These Sunday newspapers were Lloyd’s Illustrated London
Newspaper (1842), the News of the World (1843) and Reynolds’s Weekly
Newspaper (1850). They all managed a skilful combination of radical
rhetoric and elements of popular cultural continuity: ‘all radical, or at
least Liberal, all catering for sensation, all containing stories and illus-
trations’ (Lee, 1976: 71). Their most spectacular combination of the
sensational, the radical and the nationalistic came in their coverage of
the Crimean war. They were popular in reach because of their ability to
articulate aspects of everyday life and to express it in a language identi-
fiable as belonging to its audience. The emergence of the popular
Sundays in Britain is much closer chronologically and generically with
the emergence of the Penny Press in the United States.

It is as if, loosed

from the restrictions of the taxes on knowledge and bound into an
expanding capital market, the popular newspaper could only have
moved in one direction. The same seems to be true of the development
of the popular press at about this time in France (Palmer, 1983).

The commercial success of these newspapers may have incorporated

the views of the general public, but it was firmly anchored in the estab-
lished tradition and style of the broadside, almanac and ballad form
which had previously acted before all else as profit makers for the
printers and publishers. These newspapers learnt how to combine these
elements in a manner which made them accessible to a readership eager
to learn about the world and to be entertained, but in ways which did
not demand too much direct reflection on political concerns despite
the fact that Reynolds, for example, was at first committed to support
the six points of the People’s Charter. Vincent argues that the popular
press played a large part in developing a commercial genre which:
‘in translating the discrimination of news into a completely new cate-
gory of popular leisure coincided with the virtual disappearance of
working-class politics’ (Vincent, 1993: 252). Perhaps the disappearance
of working-class political newspapers was more of an incorporation of
working-class politics into a style which favoured the emerging bour-
geois consensus, not in the hurly burly of political debate but rather in
a radically new form of consumer-spectator society.

Lloyd’s, Reynolds’s and the News of the World made profits by

successfully and regularly addressing the lower classes, by playing to
the passions of a popular audience with a radical tone but one divorced
from either calls to organize politically or to engage in any broader
political analysis. This constituted a commercialization of the radical
voice. Sunday newspapers in particular were drawn more to the popular

Shaping the Social Market

genre of melodrama as a means to maximize readerships with all of this
genre’s ideological and social implications. It drew upon the still popu-
lar genre of ‘last dying speeches’ and related narratives of transgression
and punishment. Melodrama represents the world as a stark set of
contrasts between good and evil (Brooks, 1984) and without much in
the way of analysis as to the causes of antisocial or criminal behaviour
beyond blame attached to individuals. However, Knelman (1992) argues
that melodrama was a broader discourse within mid-Victorian prose
than simply fodder for the Sunday newspapers and claims that the
mid-Victorian press generally used the techniques of melodramatic
fiction in presenting the darker sides of social life including rudimen-
tary psychological analyses, a fascination with shocking detail and
calls for justice and retribution even before the courts’ pronouncements,
and just as the Victorian novelists presented a moral code so too did
the journalists present the material of real life to reinforce prevailing
standards of behaviour (Knelman, 1992: 35).

At the start, Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper was a miscellany of

political commentary, news with a special appeal to the interests of the
working class plus sensational stories of bizarre events, crimes and
gossip as well as more traditional newspaper fare such as court reports,
notices to correspondents and advertisements. The publisher’s ideas
were prominently displayed, often signed by him on the front page.

In Reynolds’s Weekly for 7 July 1850 ‘The proletarian’s career from

the cradle to the grave’, ends:

How immense are the abuses which render our social system abhor-
rent to the humane man and terrible to the thoughtful one! – how
undeserved are the honours, the luxuries, and the blessings which
the favoured few enjoy – are how tremendous are the woes, the
wrongs, and the cruelties, which the millions endure . . . One
wholesale annihilation of the abuse, on the one hand, and one
unlimited acknowledgement of rights on the other, can alone save
this country from chaos – from anarchy – from ruin. The People’s
Charter, as the means towards the reconstruction of the social
system, is the only panacea, the only remedy.

Berridge notes that the language of political discourse in Reynolds’s
Weekly is similar to that in the theatre and popular fiction which was
drawn in large part from Reynolds’s own experience of writing novels
(Berridge, 1978: 253–254). However, there was a political aspect to the
dominance of the melodramatic in the Sunday papers which subtly
discouraged a genuine political engagement on behalf of its readers:

The political discourse in Reynolds’s Weekly divides and totalises
the political ‘facts’ into implacable evil and unbeatable good.

The Language of Newspapers

But while it validates the struggle between these two forces, it
denies the inevitability of any final social disruption. (Humpherys,
1990: 45)

By the late Victorian heyday of these popular Sunday newspapers, any
initial radicalism had been subsumed into a popular representation of
the activities of the crowd, as in the example below, with a political
distance between the report and the possible motivations of the demon-
strators. It is a long way from even the ‘old corruption’ rhetoric of the
early-century publicists who overtly sided with the concerns of the
crowd and who wrote from a perspective partisan to their viewpoint.
The tiered headlines introducing this extract showed that the initial
focus is on the effects not the causes of the demonstration.

SERIOUS RIOTING IN LONDON
SCENE IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE
WEST END SHOPS WRECKED
EXTRAORDINARY PANIC

On Monday, in the interest of the unemployed of London, a demon-
stration of a very mixed character and ended in disorder, was held in
Trafalgar-square. The original meeting was called by the labourers’
league, who thought to stimulate the authorities in proceeding with
works of relief. The occasion was seized some Fair Trade leaguers of
the east-end to pose before the public as the exponents of working
class opinion, and also by the body called the ‘Revolutionary Social
Democratic Federation,’ who had given out that they would seize
the platforms of the other demonstrators . . . For a time the roughs
quite defied the police, and a red flag was waved above them. Some
of the mob pelted the police with flour . . . (14 February 1886)

Long accounts, including all possible details of events and appearance
drawing upon the melodramatic narrative conventions of the Victorian
novel are mapped onto the detail and chronology of court reporting:

Mr Hicks opened an inquiry at the workhouse, Wallis’s-yard,
Buckingham-palace-road, on Thursday, touching the death of
Edwin Thomas Bartlett, aged 40, partner in a firm of grocers and
provision dealers, carrying on business at Station-road Herne-hill,
and other places, and who died at 85, Claverton-street Pimlico, on
New Year’s day, under peculiar circumstances.
Edwin Bartlett, deceased’s father, stated that his son was married
12 years ago, his wife being under age at the time. For two years she
did not live with the deceased, but completed her education abroad.
She then lived with him at Herne-hill, Merton Abbey, and Dover.
In October last they went to 85, Claverton-street, where they occu-
pied furnished rooms. Deceased’s health, had been remarkably

Shaping the Social Market

good until shortly before Christmas, when he became ill. Witnesses
saw him two or three times, and could not account for his illness.
On a subsequent occasion Mrs Bartlett refused to allow him to see
his son, stating that he was too ill to receive visitors. On December
28 he received a letter from her and went to the house, and had a
long interview with his son, who although queer in his manner,
appeared very confident of speedy recovery. He told witness that in
the doctor’s opinion his illness had arisen from mercurial poison-
ing, but he could not understand how he could have taken such a
poison, as he never used mercury in his business. Something was
also said about lead poisoning, the deceased remarking that he had
opened many tea chests, and might have been poisoned in that way.
The conversation took place in the presence of Mrs Bartlett. On Jan.
1 witness was telegraphed for, and found his son dead. He insisted
on a post mortem examination by independent medical men . . .
(10 January 1886)

An excellent example of the sort of narrative description of character
comes in the presentation of Mrs Bartlett at her trial during the notori-
ous ‘Pimlico Mystery’.

Mrs. Bartlett’s eyes were drooping, and she stood motionless with
arms straight down the sides – a small figure, without hat or bonnet,
shawl or mantle, but wearing a well-fitting black silk dress, relieved
by something white at the neck, and she was conspicuous by the
great shock of short black hair which surmounted a somewhat
broad and sallow face. (18 April 1886)

Charles Dickens: Social narratives between fiction
and non-fiction

Dickens’s influence on the development of nineteenth-century news-
paper language was of enormous significance (Tulloch, 2007) because
of his connections to the most prominent fictional authors of the day
and his impact as editor and journalist on a generation of journalists
who succeeded him such as Yates, Jerrold, Sala, his ‘young men’
(Edwards, 1997). He provides the fullest demonstration of the mutual
influence of fiction and non-fiction in the mid-Victorian age in his
urban reportage and his ability to recreate the patterns of popular
speech (Tulloch, 2007: 66). As befits an author who straddled these
generic fields he uses a wealth of literary, including biblical allusion,
drawn from the store of general education available at the time. His
journalism is a veritable treasure chest of Victorian popular culture and
demonstrates the more efficient and profitable representation of social

The Language of Newspapers

knowledge which popular journalism took upon itself in the nineteenth
century as a ‘specialised role within the social observance of reality’
(Smith, 1978: 165). Dickens worked on the Morning Chronicle from
1834 but it was his contributions to the Examiner from 1837–1843 and
then from 1848–1849, that Brice and Fielding claim helped form his
interest in society, and shifts his style from reporter to journalist (Brice
and Fielding, 1981: 1). His writing began to encompass social commen-
tary, satire and dialogue as it moved from lively reportage to ‘brilliantly
inventive and entertaining journalism’ (Slater, 1997: xx).

Interspersed with a running commentary on the play in progress

at a popular theatre, Dickens uses his fictional character Mr Whelks to
consider the tastes and entertainments of the lower classes of the
metropolis in brilliant pastiche:

The Amusements of the People
  As one half of the world is said not to know how the other half
lives, so it may be affirmed that the upper half of the world neither
knows nor greatly cares how the lower half amuses itself. Believing
that it does not care because it does not know, we purpose occasion-
ally recording a few facts on the subject.
  The general character of the lower class of dramatic amusements
is a very significant sign of a people, and a very good test of their
intellectual condition. We design to make our readers acquainted in
the first place with a few of our experiences under this head in the
metropolis . . .
  Joe Whelks of the New Cut, Lambeth, is not much of a reader, has
no great store of books, no very commodious room to read in, no
very decided inclination to read, and no power at all of presenting
vividly before his mind’s eye what he reads about. But put Joe in
the gallery of the Victoria Theatre; show him doors and windows in
the scene that will open and shut, and that people can get in and
out of; tell him a story with these aids, and by the help of live men
and women dressed up, confiding to him their innermost secrets, in
voices audible half a mile off; and Joe will unravel a story through
all its entanglements, and sit there as long after midnight as you
have anything left to show him . . .
  The company in the pit were not very clean or sweet-savoured,
but there were some good-humoured mechanics among them,
with their wives. These were generally accompanied by ‘the baby’
insomuch that the pit was a perfect nursery. No effect made on the
stage was so curious, as the looking down on the quiet faces of these
babies fast asleep, after looking up at the staring sea of heads in
the gallery. There were a good many cold fried soles in the pit,
besides; and a variety of flat stone bottles, of all portable sizes . . .
(Household Words, 30 March 1850)

Shaping the Social Market

The Daily Telegraph: Exploring the potential of
liberalization

We have already noted the accuracy of Chalaby’s (1998) claims that the
modern discourse of journalism takes shape at the specific point when
market mechanisms begin to dominate the ownership, strategies and
competitive practices of public writing after 1855. The period also saw
the nature of news itself become increasingly refined. The establish-
ment in 1851 of Reuter’s News Agency began to ensure a regular and
more homogenous supply of routine news. This had the result of easing
the chief problem of previous newspapers – the irregular flow of news
for a daily press. News had always been a commodity but it was now
able to become a more streamlined and capitalized commodity. It was
no longer simply an addition to a publisher’s portfolio but a prized
product in its own right and an invaluable conduit to the advertisers’
revenue.

In 1853, advertising duty was abolished which added to the com-

mercial revenues upon which the newspapers and magazines were
increasingly dependent. In 1855, stamp duty was abolished; to take
immediate advantage, the Daily Telegraph was founded as the Daily
Telegraph and Courier on 29 June 1955 and heralded its arrival, not
without a certain prescience, as, ‘. . . the new era of journalism . . .’ The
Daily Telegraph was the most successful daily experiment on the lifting
of taxes. It looked the same as its competitors but was the first London
morning paper to sell for a penny. It quickly established an identity
which distinguished it from the deliberate elitism of the Times: ‘The
Times, the paper for the City merchant, and the Daily Telegraph, the
paper for the clerk and shopkeeper’ (Brown, 1985: 246). It still gave
many columns over to leading articles and contained serious and
authoritative letters to the editor but it was the ability of Edward Levy
to introduce elements of the human interest of American popular jour-
nalism to the paper which broadened its appeal and success. As a
popularizer, Levy was the forerunner of Stead and Northcliffe:

‘What we want is a human note’ was the instruction of J.M. Levy to
his young entrants . . . [his] intention was to produce something
different from other newspapers in which politics were presumed
to be the only interest of the reader. (Burnham: 76–77)

It produced one of the most important new developments in Victorian
journalism in its public campaigning around the concerns of its
readers. A celebrated example of this is its coverage of one of the great
moral dilemmas of the Victorian age, the hitherto taboo subject of

The Language of Newspapers

the recourse of respectable middle-class men to prostitution as they
delayed marriage until they were financially secure to provide for a
wife. Although this provoked understandable accusations of sensation-
alism and prurience, it did establish a new form of relationship with its
readers beyond these factors. It built on the letters of readers, already an
established tradition, but with the novel twist that they enabled the
paper to emphasize its contact with this readership and its voice, in
creating a concerted and large-scale debate. As a result of this strategy,
it has been credited with the creation of a more participatory journal-
ism, ‘moving authority from leaders to Readers . . .’ (Robson, 1995: 260).
The language of the launch of the campaign indicates something of the
rhetorical inclusion of the reader within the paper’s project: ‘. . . the
army of public pity and indignation . . . a new Crusade . . . a moral
Armada of hope and effort . . . a vast body of public opinion . . .’ (Robson,
1995: 17).

From its first edition, it signalled an editorial coup in providing

abbreviated accounts of the proceedings of Parliament, to provide for
an audience with less leisure and interest in the verbatim accounts of
the Times and in deference to a belief that a wider readership wanted a
broader digest of the contemporary world:

Our readers will perceive that, in place of reporting the proceedings
of Parliament in full, we give a copious summary, in the belief that
the great majority of readers of the Daily Press will prefer the pith
and marrow of the Debates to the lengthened reports presented every
morning in the columns of our contemporaries.

(20 June 1855)

In order to sustain this newly mined popularity, it devoted a whole
page to reports of a riot, pickpocketing, bankruptcy, child maintenance
and domestic violence. There was, for instance, a graphic account of
the witness taking the stand in a child maintenance case:

Mr Hutchinson having called Mrs. Thatcher, an elegant and lady-
like personage, as soon as the chief usher administered the oath,
she instantly fell down in the witness-box, striking her face upon
the floor with a sickening rebound, and for some time it was consid-
ered that the fall and the excitement would end fatally. (20 June
1855)

The Daily Telegraph was, within a few years, selling more than all other
London dailies combined, including the Times. It included a growing
number of writers, including George Augustus Sala from 1858, who
wrote in a livelier fashion than had been the custom in the serious daily
papers and reached out to a broader section of the middle classes. The
self-consciously decorative and effusive language which came to be
known as Telegraphese would have drawn its cultural capital from the

Shaping the Social Market

Victorian appreciation of rich writing and descriptive writing in gen-
eral, from the periods of master stylists such as Carlyle or Macauley
or Gibbon (Matheson, 2000: 561). Sala was hugely versatile moving
from social to literary commentary and then to a self-defined role as
Special Commissioner in Russia, and in America during the Civil War
as well as in wars in Europe. He was for many years the best known of
the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Young Lions,’ claiming innovative interview
subjects for the newspaper in Napoleon III in 1865 and Garibaldi in
1866. He worked well within the more popular tone and broader social
scope of the Daily Telegraph and has been claimed to be a pioneer for
later developments in the language of newspaper of the late nineteenth
century:

He wrote light leaders and reported exuberantly on overseas and
domestic events for the paper. His fluid ‘pen-pictures’ influenced a
generation of popular writers, and, perhaps more than any other
journalist, he helped to create a style of ‘bright,’ human interest
writing that was to become so integral a part of the New Journalism
. . . (Wiener, 1996: 63)

By the 1870s, the use of numerous headlines to lead an important news
story was one of the more noticeable innovations in terms of its layout.
The invention by the paper of the box number for advertisements is a
clear indication of its acumen in exploiting the new economic opportu-
nities for daily newspapers. The combination of its commercial and
linguistic flair ensured that it had a sale of 200,000 by the 1880s. There
was, however, resistance to its new brand of journalism. The Pall Mall
Gazette made frequent disparaging remarks about Daily Telegraph
referring to it on 9 January 1868 as a ‘quack journal’ because of its asso-
ciation with cheap doctors and patent medicine cures; whereas in the
same year, the Saturday Review’s two articles on ‘Newspaper Sewage’
on 5 December and 12 December 1868 were a clear indictment of
the moral tone of the Daily Telegraph and its nearest competitors, the
Standard and the Morning Star.

The gradual erosion of anonymity

The flamboyant and easily identifiable writing of Sala and the subse-
quent rise of celebrated and named journalists on particular papers led
inexorably to the decline of absolute anonymity which had been until
the mid-Victorian period one of the anchors of journalistic integrity.
Anonymity was directly linked to the belief of newspaper owners and
editors that argument could be won and opinion moulded without
recourse to the personal reputation of the writer. It was very much part

The Language of Newspapers

of the work which newspaper editors had begun to perfect from the late
eighteenth century; to shape the convictions of the newspaper, organi-
cally, towards a much more homogenized approach which could
enhance the positioning of a particular newspaper within a specific
niche of the market where readers would come to expect a certain
approach or framing to the newspaper’s coverage. The gradual demise
of anonymity was a significant element in the growth of the related
trends of personalization and popularization in the newspaper which
would continue to drive developments in their language and their over-
all approach to readerships throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.

Conclusion

The newspaper of the nineteenth century was a complex formation
which moved to incorporate the impacts of the Reform Acts of 1832,
1867, 1884 with their implications for the relationship between politics
and a widening, enfranchised public. This complexity was added to by
rapidly evolving technological, economic and demographic changes
which all share intersecting chronologies with that of the newspaper.
The confluence of news agencies and the development of the telegraph
brought a much more reliable and economical flow of information and
dictated the emphasis on news which began to dominate the daily
press. Reuter set up an office in London in 1851 to provide commercial
intelligence and in 1858 extended this to foreign digests of news to
London papers. Private news transmission by telegraph began in 1866
together with further developments in communications, especially the
telephone, allowed the practice of ‘double-checking’ of sources to
become established within journalism and is considered to be one of its
defining modern characteristics (Smith, 1978: 155). As the supply of
news increased because of better transport and technologies of commu-
nication, the newspaper needed to be better managed. Newspapers
were able to claim authority on their own terms as they now went
beyond the provision of complete or shortened verbatim accounts of
public proceedings. There was an increasing impact of developments
in the popular press on the elite press as the years went by although
always with a dignified time lag. The key date was, however, 1855 after
which all newspapers were in open competition for readers and for
advertisers. The consequences of these changes were profound, leading
to a demarcation between roles and between genres in newspaper pro-
duction and content; an increasingly class-based polarization between
elite and popular newspapers.

Introduction

The American influence on the shaping of the language of the English
newspaper is nowhere more evident than in the nineteenth century as
the newspaper moved from addressing a politically motivated reader-
ship to a more general mass public. Schudson asserts the explicitly
American influence on the shaping of journalism in general, as practice
and discourse:

Journalism is not something that floated platonically above the
world and that each country copied down, shaping it to its own
natural grammar. It is something that – as we know it today –
Americans had a major hand in inventing. (Schudson, 2008: 187)

The American penny dailies of the 1830s were the first newspapers to
attempt to write consistently and commercially for a broad social stra-
tum of ordinary people in a voice which attempted to capture something
of the vitality of everyday speech. It would be no exaggeration to claim
that they provided a primer in a new vernacular for increasing numbers
of immigrant readers. Furthermore, the language of these newspapers
which began to articulate a wider social range of language helped
broaden the definition of news by embracing a more complete spec-
trum of the lived experience of daily life in the expanding American
cities. They soon systematized this into a repertoire of stories and
strategies, a coverage of crime and deployment of interviews, which
could lay claim to have encapsulated a commercialized version of the
interests of the ordinary people. Later in the century, these strategies
were developed in an intensifying commercial struggle between the
New York newspaper owners, Pulitzer and Hearst. The success of these
new forms of popular journalism became a factor in the development of
newspapers in Britain as they too sought to appeal to wider audiences
after 1855. However, the more entrenched class distinctions in British
society meant that each newspaper carved out a particular socio-
political niche for itself, often based more on specific articulations of
social class. At first, it had been the Sunday newspapers which pro-
vided a commercially successful appeal to the working people in Britain

A message from America:
A commercial vernacular

The Language of Newspapers

while various London-based daily newspapers tried, with varying
degrees of success, to attract readers from a widening middle class.
By the end of the century, under the influence of the American popular
press, the British version of the New Journalism would begin to reshape
the style and content of much of the national press with its emphasis on
sensationalism, typographical changes and the adoption of a familiar
tone with its readers. The most significant developments in popular
journalism at this time, both in the United States and Britain, were to
have a major impact on the structure of newspapers’ language for the
next hundred years as the story began to usurp the report as the main
format of the newspapers (Matheson, 2000) with all the implications
that this has for the prioritizing and framing of social narratives
(Entmann, 1993).

The democratic tradition

The strong democratic tradition within American political culture
which emerged as a key factor in fashioning emancipation from the
British Empire found full expression in periodical and pamphlet publi-
cation. Rhetorically at least, this tradition could be called upon with
consistency and authority when the American newspaper began its
engagement with wider-based popular audiences from the early nine-
teenth century. One of the best examples of the journalist as a political
propagandist on behalf of the people in the years prior to the American
War of Independence was Samuel Adams who from a radical perspec-
tive contributed to the Boston Gazette and Country Journal as well as
acting as editor for the Independent Advertiser. Emery and Emery
have highlighted the main rhetorical features he required to make such
public writing persuasive and therefore successful:

He understood that to win the inevitable conflict, he and his cohorts
must achieve five main objectives. They must justify the course
they advocated. They must advertise the advantages of victory.
They must arouse the masses – the real shock troops – by instilling
hatred of enemies. They must neutralize and logical and reasonable
arguments proposed by the opposition. And finally, they must
phrase all the issues in black and white, so that the purposes might
be clear even to the common laborer. Adams was able to do all this,
and his principal tool was the colonial newspaper. (Emery and
Emery, 1992: 46–47)

Thomas Paine, whose influence on English radicalism has already been
explored, also contributed to the creation of a democratic radical rheto-
ric in American journalism. He wrote for the Pennsylvania Magazine
for long enough to establish a reputation as a fine polemicist on issues

A Message from America

such as slavery, universal suffrage and education. In 1776, Common
Sense is credited with bringing the less radical Patriots into the revolu-
tionary movement. It had an enormous and instant success, selling
120,000 copies in 3 months (Emery and Emery, 1992: 53). We must bear
this tradition of popular rhetoric in mind, addressed to the ordinary
citizens of an emergent democracy, if we are to understand the reasons
for the enormous success of the penny papers of the 1830s. However,
what transformed this democratic rhetoric into cheap popular news-
papers was less a popular demand for a direct political address and
more the impact of mechanization during the Industrial Revolution
which ensured that lower production and distribution costs could
effect an extension of the traditionally narrow readerships which the
middle class American press had helped to maintain (Mott, 1962: 215).
There were two complementary aspects to the newspaper revolution.
One was the improved efficiencies in technology and news-gathering
strategies which allowed news to be first collected and then distributed
more profitably than ever. Technological advances in printing enabled
a cheaper paper to be sold not for 6 cents but for a single cent, but this
demanded a larger readership to cover costs more immediately than the
older system of longer-term subscriptions would allow. The cheaper
papers, therefore, broke with the tradition of selling on subscription,
which implied a long-standing financial commitment to a particular
newspaper, and shifted to being sold on the street on a daily basis which
made for a more ephemeral contest for the attention of the passer-by.
The second change, emerging from the appeal to a new clientele, was
an attempt to rediscover something of the rhetorical appeal to the
people which had been used so successfully by the radical journalists
of the previous century. This time the language of the ordinary people
was inflected to commercial rather than political ends. Nerone traces
the popular expansion of the American press in the nineteenth century
explicitly to the ideas and aspirations for democratic participation in
society triggered by the American Revolution:

The expansion of the press in the United States was a result of ideas
and expectations popularized in the American Revolution. This
change, beginning in the eighteenth century, was deeply affected by
two grand developments in the nineteenth century: the rise of
popular partisan politics and the appearance of a market economy.
(Nerone, 1987: 377)

It is generally considered (Douglas, 1999: 1–9) that it was during the
Jackson presidency that the civic self-confidence and egalitarianism of
the Revolution came to flourish in a popular press which drew upon
older traditions of the vulgar populism of American broadsheets and

The Language of Newspapers

ballads (Nordin, 1979) to establish a profitable representation of the
everyday interests of the ordinary American people. The confidence of
this era allowed newspapers to sell a sense of political and social
involvement back to the people as readers and in a language which
sought to recapture something of the excitement of everyday life’s
trials, scandals and tragedies. In turn, this new colloquialism could
claim to have established the bond between reader and paper which
would ensure a continuing commercial success.

To underline its democratizing address to the common reader, the

first of the successful penny dailies, the New York Sun was launched
on 3 September 1833 by Benjamin H. Day with its motto: ‘It Shines For
ALL’. Schiller has placed this in the foreground of a radical realignment
of newspapers’ engagement with the wider public:

The motto, profoundly captured the democratic promise of the
penny press: the extension of public access to information and met-
amorphosis of the character of public information itself . . . By
giving all citizens an equal access to knowledge and direct personal
knowledge of impartially presented news, the penny press could
boast of its thorough revision of the language of the public sphere.
(Schiller, 1981: 48)

The New York Sun provided fresh, topical news and presented it in a
concise manner, emphasizing the local with human interest and often
sensational events at its core. Court reporting, including the verbatim
vernacular of the proceedings themselves fitted this pattern and was
enormously popular. These reports were often the source of a mockery
which highlighted the ambivalence of popular newspapers to parts of
their target audience. The vernacular could in itself be a source of
humour for the newspaper with which to entertain a readership which
fancied itself a cut above the pathetic participants of daily court activ-
ity. Stevens (1991: 24) has exemplified the mocking mimicry of these
court reports, for example, ‘Honrable Honor’, ‘Jontlemen of the jury’ to
‘plade’ her own cause. The humorous recounting of police-court news
had been developed in Cleaves Weekly Police Gazette in London which
shows that the flow between the United States and Britain was not
entirely one-way traffic. It consisted of a set of influences between jour-
nalism traditions very much framed within the economics and political
possibilities of specific social environments. This meant that while the
United States got broad-based penny daily newspapers, Britain was
developing a range of popular Sunday newspapers directed specifi-
cally at the working classes within a commercialized idiom. If the new
penny newspapers took the public sphere to the streets, then its court
reporting brought the streets back to the public as entertainment and

A Message from America

information. In addition to its editorial features, the inclusion of small
classified advertisements in the Sun was an important innovation in
that it reinforced the attractiveness of this new penny newspaper to a
hitherto neglected audience. They were sold by space rates for cash
(instead of on an annual basis, which was the practice of the other
papers), especially the ‘Help Wanted’ notices (Crouthamel, 1989: 20)
making it popular with the unemployed.

Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald

The success of the Sun encouraged competitors to vie for the affections
and curiosity of a new newspaper-reading public. The most significant in
terms of its contribution to the evolving language of the newspaper was
James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald. Even as a court-reporter at the
Courier and Enquirer, he had referred to the newspaper as a medium of
popular enlightenment, in terms reminiscent of the Revolutionary press,
identifying what he thought was the democratic role of the newspaper in
expressing the views of the people on contemporary events: ‘The press is
the living jury of the nation’ (Crouthamel, 1989: 13).

As well as being an opportunist with a well-developed sense of

historical timing, he could also lay claim to having a fairly consistent
democratic tone to his politics. This had, once again, been clear from
his early days in journalism at the Courier and Enquirer:

An editor must always be with the people – think with them – feel
with them – and he need fear nothing, he will always be right –
always be strong – always popular – always free. (12 November
1931 in Mott, 1962: 232)

This sort of populism might have been simple commercial common
sense but it is certainly an approach he perfected as his New York
Herald rose to a dominant position on account of its wide circulation
(77,000 in 1860 made it the world’s largest sale). It provided a lively,
concise account of the day of the city with crime, gossip, sport and
business news. It also took a keen interest in using the interview to
develop crime reporting.

Its use during the Robinson-Jewett murder case in 1836 was signifi-

cant not just in terms of the technique itself but in the way that Bennett
used the structure of the interview to frame the language in terms of the
social and political commentary of the paper, as a spokespiece for the
values of ordinary people against the privileged classes and, most
importantly, in creating a textual collusion between the vitality of this
reporting of direct speech and the speech patterns of the readers.
The case involved the murder of a prostitute, Jewett, in New York and

The Language of Newspapers

100

provided an ideal opportunity to package many of the traditional
features of popular melodrama into the format of the penny paper with
all the additional advantages that running the story on a daily basis
could bring, constantly embroidering it with the latest sensational details
for a large contemporary audience. The suspicion fell on a young and
wealthy socialite, Robinson, and in taking the side of the murdered pros-
titute, Bennett was able to appeal to the curiosity of his readers, their
sense of sympathy with a poor victim and rail against the hypocrisies of
the wealthy. He provided editorial commentary which reflected directly
on the inequity of the treatment of the poor by the criminal justice
system and combined these factors to justify his intrusive, personality-
based news coverage as a campaign for social improvement.

On April 11, the front page was dominated by the news and the lead

editorial in the Herald was headed: ‘Most Atrocious Murder’.

On his third visit to the house, he conducted his famous interview

with the proprietor, Mrs Townsend:

Did you hear no other noise previous to the knocking of the young
man to let you in?
  I think I heard a noise and said who’s there, but received no
answer.
  How did you know that the person you let in was Frank (the alias
Robinson used at the house)?
  He gave his name.
  Did you see his face?
  No – his cloak was held up over his face. I saw nothing but
his eyes as he passed me – he had on a hat and a coat. (17 April
1836)

He justified his coverage in the face of a hostile reception from the
respectable press by emphasizing its role as a social commentary with
the potential to shake a complacent nation:

Instead of relating the recent awful tragedy of Ellen Jewett as a dull
police report, we made it the starting point to open up a full view
upon the morals of society – the hinge of a course of mental action
calculated to benefit the age – the opening scene of a great domestic
drama that will, if properly conducted, bring about a reformation –
a revolution – a total revolution in the present diseased state of
society and morals. (Crouthamel, 1989: 30)

As a populist, there was also a darker side to Bennett’s political
convictions. He shared many of the nationalistic sentiments of the read-
ers he so astutely courted and in trying to match these tastes, he was a
regular editorial contributor to debates about America’s mission in the
world, known to contemporaries as ‘Manifest Destiny’. His patriotic

A Message from America

101

convictions often stepped over into chauvinism and xenophobia as in
the following example:

The Anglo-Saxon race is intended by an overruling Providence to
carry the principles of liberty, the refinements of civilisation, and
the advantages of the mechanical era through every land, even those
now barbarous. The prostrate savage and the benighted heathen,
shall yet be imbued with Anglo-Saxon intelligence and culture, and
be blessed with the institutions, both civil and religious, which are
now our inheritance. Mexico, too, must submit to the o’erpowering
influence of the Anglo-Saxon. (Crouthamel, 1989: 57)

Bennett’s Herald became the first newspaper to develop the society
reporting which was to become the forerunner of celebrity-based news.
Bennett’s approach was novel in the way it placed an old genre within
a new aspirant capitalist democracy. The genre itself was as old as
printed communication – gossip about social superiors – but in the
market meritocracy of mid-century America it offered a more flattened
form of social representation than the public sphere of the middle-class
periodicals.

The general achievements of the penny dailies

Beyond New York, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and the Baltimore
Sun as well the Daily Times in Boston all contributed to the generation
of a new class of newspaper readers. An important aspect for their
development was the Mexican War (1846–1848). War might tradition-
ally increase newspaper sales but it might also be observed that it is one
of the prime catalysts in shifts in newspaper language. This was never
truer than during this period when the new printing technologies
and populist appeal of the Penny Press merged in the coverage of the
Mexican War. There were frequent etched illustrations of battle scenes
and strategic battle plans. Headlines in multiple decks over big stories
became commonplace. By the late 1840s there was a tendency to extend
them vertically for big stories, spacing them out and adding more decks
until they might occupy nearly half a column (Mott, 1962: 292) Larger
headlines led to the omission of verbs and a language which matched
the populism and patriotic assertiveness which Bennett had found was
such a productive ingredient in his journalism.

The rise of the Penny Press and the perception, at least, of the politi-

cal potency of the common people in the Jacksonian era were closely
related. Schudson supports this view while adding that the Penny Press
emerged in response to the needs of what he calls a ‘democratic market
society’, which he identifies as having three main characteristics: the

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consolidation of a mass democracy, an ideology of the marketplace and
an increasingly urban society. The new papers, he claims:

were spokesmen for egalitarian ideals in politics, economic life and
social life through their organization of sales, their solicitation of
advertising, their emphasis on news, their catering to large audi-
ences and their decreasing concern with the editorial . . . (Schudson,
1978: 60)

Economics always has an important cultural aspect and it was the
cultural component of the mid-century popular American newspapers
which connected the folk traditions of popular readerships with the
political expectations of the Revolutionary tradition within an early
market economy. Thus the earliest popular penny papers were enacting
a form of inclusive hegemony, binding their readers into the project of
American market-democratic modernity by speaking their language.

Joseph Pulitzer’s New Journalism

The New York World was revived by Joseph Pulizer in 1883 and from
the day he took over he embraced and extended the techniques intro-
duced by the Penny Press (Stevens, 1991: 99). In his first edition he
stressed that his paper was:

. . . not only large but truly democratic – dedicated to the cause of
the people rather than to that of the purse potentates – devoted
more to the New World than the Old World – that will expose all
fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses – that will battle
for the people with earnest sincerity. (Mott, 1962: 434)

He developed the style of his paper to better appeal to the poorer classes,
those who were unaccustomed to reading a daily newspaper, the
migrants to the burgeoning cities and the immigrants to the new nation.
All these helped to establish the economic base for a newer, truly mass
journalism and simultaneously they were all becoming drawn into the
textual constructing of a new style of imagined community (Anderson,
1986). The aspects of this New Journalism which made it such an effec-
tive representation of the culture of its popular audience comprised
four complementary strategies: a rhetoric which mimicked the voice
and supposed opinions of the working people; a broad match between
the news values of the newspaper and the everyday interests of this
same audience; a high reliance on entertainment and sensation; an
appeal to a specifically national audience which reinforced chauvinist
opinion. Juergens (1966) in his study of Joseph Pulitzer has drawn
attention to the linkage between the sensationalism of this New Jour-
nalism and its distinctive prose style claiming it to be slangy, colloquial

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and personal. His analysis emphasizes that this is one of the chief
conduits through which the sensational newspaper was able to com-
municate its identity to the masses of people who bought it, constructing
a language in which readers could identify their own speech patterns
and political prejudices. His city-wide network of reporters would
scour the city for stories which would fit the paper’s pattern: ‘. . . Pulitzer
sent reporters in pursuit of crime, sensation, and disaster stories, and
told them to write in a racier narrative style. The headline writers went
for punchier verbs and alliteration’ (Stevens, 1991: 69).

Campaigns and crusades were a complement to the populist style of

the New Journalism allowing self-promotion to act as a key part of its
identity and its relationship to its readers. One of the paper’s most suc-
cessful crusades was to raise the funds to construct a base for the Statue
of Liberty. In May 1885, the World said that since the statue was a gift
from the French people to the American people, the people and not the
government should build the base. Eight months later, the World had
collected the necessary $100,000.

William Randolph Hearst: Extending the language
of sensation

Competition within the popular newspaper market was to further
drive developments in the language of the New Journalism. The most
significant moment came when William Randolph Hearst bought the
New York Journal in 1895. He made the strategic decision to exaggerate
all the brasher elements of Pulitzer’s approach including an even more
prominent set of claims to be on the side of the people and against
corruption and complacency in the corridors of power. He had much
less of a consistent political agenda than Pulitzer, more rabble-rousing
and populist posturing, but in combination with the other features of
what became the Yellow Journalism, Hearst’s paper was a huge popular
success and set new levels of sensation and vulgarity in its language,
layout and the blurring of fact and fiction. The Journal was a crusading
newspaper, too, but it went far beyond other New York newspapers of
the time, including Pulitzer’s. When the paper secured a court injunc-
tion to prevent the sale of a gas franchise, it claimed on 7 July 1897 that
what it had discovered was: ‘a new idea in journalism’; and it adopted
the slogan: ‘While Others Talk, the Journal Acts’ (Mott, 1962: 522–523).
Encouraged by circulation success, it continued along this path of pub-
lic contestation through well-publicized crusades against any sale of a
public commodity which it felt was against the interests of the people.
It extended this populist concern into alleged political corruption and
Hearst then turned to solicit compliments from civic leaders across the

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104

country and printed them under such headings as, ‘Journalism that
Acts; Men of Action in All Walks of Life Heartily Endorse the Journal’s
Fight in Behalf of the People’ (Emery and Emery, 1992: 197).

The Journal extended investigative reporting to the extent that the

paper itself became involved in solving the Guldensuppe murder case
where the reporters were not so much undercover investigators, as
going door-to-door in competition with the police in reinforcement of
their claims to be servants of the people’s interests. And what great
claims could be made of this effective publicity stunt in terms of the
powers of the newspaper! Journal reporters, boasted Hearst, constituted
‘a detective force at least as efficient as that maintained at public
expense by this or any other city’ (New York Journal, 28 January 1899)
(Mott, 1962: 523–524).

At the culmination of the Guldenseppe murder hunt, the Journal

devoted 30 columns to the pursuit and capture of the murderer, Thron.
A large drawing of his face on page one pointed out his ‘cruel mouth
and bad eye’ The headline on 7 July 1897 again drew attention to the
distinctive contribution of this paper to the public good and read:

NEWS THAT IS NEWS
The Journal, as usual, ACTS While the Representatives of
Ancient Journalism Sit Idly By and Wait for
Something to Turn up. (Stevens, 1991: 93)

The shift in the construction of a commercialized popular voice in the
American press known as Yellow Journalism emerged in the wake of
several factors which were encroaching upon the market for the more
conventional popular newspapers of the time. An economic depression
and increasing competition from illustrated magazines had led to an
intense rivalry to attract and retain readers. Daily newspapers needed to
pander still more to the demands of a readership which was becoming
more accustomed to having its news packaged in a sensationalized,
entertainment format. The journalism which was shaped in this popular
daily market set the parameters for the tabloids of the next century with
a language and a populist appeal which were shriller, brasher, larger and
bolder with screaming headlines and often a reckless disregard for the
truth. It was nevertheless a huge commercial success. Between 1880 and
1900 when the yellow press was at its height, it was claimed that these
campaigns forged a bond between the language and news values of this
style of paper and their putative readerships’ common interests: ‘The
yellows claimed to serve as the arm of the “voiceless masses” in prote-
cting them from the ugly might of the powerful’ (Altschull, 1990: 267).

The Spanish-American war of 1896–1898 provided the perfect

opportunity for the two main popular New York dailies to rally readers

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105

behind a jingoistic celebration of the hostilities in flag-waving fashion.
Mott goes so far as to claim that their coverage was directly responsible
for the popular fervour which legitimated the government’s decision to
go to war (Mott, 1962: 527). Both papers drew expertly on the dramatic
communicative possibilities of the new style of journalism with its
visual impact and powerful delineation of national interests pitted
against a starkly negative image of the enemy. This was a concerted and
effective exercise in populist propaganda within a democratic society.
One genre of story was particularly suited to this campaign, the atrocity
story. It had been a familiar feature within broadside and newssheet
accounts of wars since the development of commercial printing and
had always drawn for its appeal on the twin dynamic of chauvinism
and fear of the outsider. Stories of rape, torture and murder were related
in graphic detail to an eager audience accompanied with line drawings,
and from 1897, their impact was increased by the introduction of half-
tone photographs. Stories of Cuban atrocities, clearly predicated on the
racialized assumption that such behaviour was a characteristic of the
Hispanic peoples, were good for circulation, keeping the readership of
both newspapers above the million mark throughout. In one notorious
example from this period, the major villain was General Valeriano
Weyler, the commander in chief of the Spanish forces in Cuba from
early 1896. The Miss Cisneros story combined metaphors of foreign
bestiality, personification of the nation and identification with an inno-
cent heroine as victim:

The unspeakable fate to which Weyler has doomed an innocent girl
whose only crime is that she has defended herself against a beast in
uniform has sent a shiver of horror through the American people.
(New York Journal, 19 August 1897, quoted in Mott, 1962: 530)

The New Journalism London-style

The New Journalism spread its influence into the British press from
America via professional contacts across the Anglophone journalism
community. Lee has claimed that it can best be described as a mixture
of journalistic and typographical devices, which taken together consti-
tuted a new style of journalism, a style which in making the paper more
readable, reflected a changing relationship between the newspaper and
its readers (Lee, 1976: 121). This reinforces the observation made
throughout the book that the form and style of the language of news-
papers provide illustrations of shifting social and commercial
relationships. Furthermore, these changes came with specific political
assumptions. Wiener has observed how the interrelated technical and
editorial components of the New Journalism could not be divorced

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106

from the democratic assumptions which had enabled it to flourish both
commercially and culturally in the United States:

. . . unless the process of Americanization is taken fully into account
the democratic component of these changes in the press may be
missed. Four key elements of American newspaper culture help to
illuminate this crucial transatlantic link between popularization
and democratization: speed, informality, human interest, and a
combination of access and aggression. (Wiener, 1996: 62)

As economic forces were taking a larger role in determining the
development of a viable spread of journalism, it was no coincidence
that the New Journalism became crystallized in the practices of the
evening London papers as they sought new readers. These papers
needed to provide the latest news on their front page to ensure street
sales which differentiated them from most of the subscription-based
morning press. Inevitably, this competition intensified as cheaper eve-
ning newspapers such as the Pall Mall Gazette and the St James’
Gazette reduced their prices from 2 pence to a penny in 1882 and it
was in these papers, most notably the Pall Mall Gazette, that the newer
styles of journalism were introduced as a further commercial ploy to
distinguish them from their more sedate morning relations. From
1892, for instance, the Morning, a halfpenny London paper, became
the first daily newspaper to consistently place news on its front page
instead of advertisements.

The innovators: George Newnes and W.T. Stead

Aspects of the American styles of journalism may have already begun
to permeate British journalism in the 1860s and 1870s but it was George
Newnes who first drew consistently on these stylistic features and
adapted them to a British market, testing and creating new boundaries
for journalism in a wide range of publications. The first and most
influential was, Titbits from all the interesting Books, Periodicals, and
Newspapers of the World. It was launched as a penny weekly on
22 October 1881 with competitions, statistics, history, bits of news,
editorials, correspondence columns, fiction, anecdotes, jokes, legal
general knowledge, competitions and adverts. Portraits and interviews
with celebrities were also a prominent inclusion in each edition. It was
a triumph of promotion, formatting and editorial flair and soon boasted
400,000 to 600,000 weekly sales. Most importantly, he developed a
popular community within his paper though a ‘sympathetic intimacy’
(Jackson, 2000: 13) with his readers which anticipated much of popular

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journalism’s subsequent appeal. There have also been those less
appreciative of Newnes’ achievements:

Newnes became aware that the new schooling was creating a class
of potential readers – people who had been taught to decipher print
without learning much else, and for whom the existing newspa-
pers, with their long articles, long paragraphs, and all-round
demands on the intelligence and imagination, were quite unsuited.
To give them what he felt they wanted, he started Tit-Bits. (Ensor,
1968: 311)

While, on the one hand, this relationship was encapsulated in reformu-
lated style and rhetoric, on the other, it relied on the efficient deployment
of technological advances and a commercial sophistication with regard
to a relationship between the readers of the newspaper and its adverti-
sing. The term New Journalism which became commonplace in Britain
from the 1880s, is reputed to have been coined in an uncomplimentary
article by Matthew Arnold:

We have had opportunities of observing a new journalism which a
clever and energetic man has lately invented. It has much to recom-
mend it; it is full of ability, novelty, variety, sensation, sympathy,
generous instincts; its one great fault is that it is feather-brained.
(1887: 638–639)

W.T. Stead, to whose journalism Arnold was referring, was keen for his
writing to act as a pressure on the government to bring about change
in society based on the agenda of engaged, campaigning journalists.
As the assistant editor of the Pall Mall Gazette from 1880, and as sole
editor from 1883, Stead had introduced scoops, a flair for self-publicity,
which drew attention to his newspaper, the development of investiga-
tive campaigning journalism in the pursuit of socially progressive
causes and the use of emotive and colourful writing. Campaigning, as
in the case of Pulitzer and later Hearst, formed an integral element of
his desire to form part of a popular momentum for change by leading
the people. This is in marked contrast with the later popular journalism
of the Daily Mail and Daily Express and their preference for a more
reactive approach to meeting the needs of their readers. In an original
interpretation of the old populist adage, vox populi, vox dei, Stead set
out as part of his journalistic credo that he wanted journalism ‘to repro-
duce in a paper the ideal of God’ (Baylen, 1972: 374). His journalism,
nevertheless, remained directed towards the liberal middle classes of
the metropolis. There was still no sign of the sort of vulgar populism
which would come to dominate the American New Journalism and
certainly no intention of capturing anything like a mass readership.

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Nevertheless, Stead clearly saw the potential of sensationalism to drive
a more democratic form of popular involvement:

It was especially important to Stead that sensationalism, as a jour-
nalistic device, facilitate one of the most important ‘governing
functions’ of the press – its ‘argus-eyed power of inspection . . .’
(Baylen, 1979: 46)

The cross-head was a development he copied from American news-
paper practice. In contrast to the dense columns of the morning
newspapers, the Pall Mall Gazette could be scanned at speed. He
included illustrations and line drawings which further broke the
monotony of the traditional printed page. He employed specialist com-
mentators to popularize knowledge of contemporary affairs and in his
‘Character Sketch’ – he blended the interview, word picture and per-
sonality analysis. The implications of these changes were clear, making,
‘. . . the page accessible to less resolute reading at the end of the day and
possibly by the family at home’ (Brake, 1988: 19).

The development of the interview was again an American import,

but Stead deployed it with aplomb in broadening the popular reach of
his journalism, conducting his first interview in October 1883, and
publishing some 134 of them the following year (Schults, 1972: 63).
One major coup was his interview with General Gordon in January
1884 before he embarked for the Sudan. As if to underline the growing
importance of women in this era of journalism, Stead’s chief inter-
viewer was Hulda Friederichs. Some commentators have located him
within a longer tradition of radical journalism:

Stead’s mercurial, hellfire temperament was that of the great pam-
phleteers. In his boldness and versatility, in his passionate belief in
the constructive power of the pen, in so many of his opinions, even
in his championship of women, he resembled Daniel Defoe and
Jonathan Swift. (Boston, 1990: 101)

The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ story published in the Pall
Mall Gazette from 6 July 1885 synthesized all the ambition of Stead’s
journalism and campaigning fervour. To highlight the problems of
prostitution among young girls, he bought a girl, Liza Armstrong, for £5
to demonstrate how widespread this practice had become and used
sensational reporting, eyewitness accounts and interviews to launch
his campaign and shame Victorian London into passing a law raising
the age of consent. It was a sensation, boosting sales to 100,000. He was
eventually imprisoned for 3 months for being judged to have procured
the girl as part of his investigative operation but not before he had con-
ducted a nationwide defence of his position and drawn support for his
cause from all sections of society. Beyond the technical and stylistic

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details of what was shortly to be christened the New Journalism,
Stead’s goal was more a moral and political one. His passionate opposi-
tion to the wrongs of society was in keeping with much of the tradition
of the ‘old corruption’ but grafted onto a moral purpose and a well-
developed commercial pragmatism. He was a forerunner of a ‘journalism
of attachment’ (Bell, 1997) from a deeply religious perspective. Yet
there are those who are more cautious about his sensationalizing of
sexual mores and its implications for journalism: ‘“Sex” had long
been a journalistic staple. Stead not only brought it into a “respectable”
middle-class paper, he made it central to journalism as political inter-
vention’ (Beetham, 1996: 125).

The success of Stead’s paper generated a proliferation of penny

newspapers in London all attempting to exploit the market for the sort
of journalism he had provided and their success undermined the circu-
lation of the Pall Mall Gazette. It suffered a further blow when much of
his revenue was lost because advertisers were anxious at risking
association with the scandalous reputation it had acquired.

Stead, as well as being an innovator, associated with the New

Journalism, was an exception within the commercialized discourse of
journalism as it widened its scope to broader and more profitable
markets to the exclusion of social aims. The polarities within popular
journalism are well captured in a communication from one style of
editor to another when Newnes wrote to Stead in 1890 on their parting
as collaborators on the Review of Reviews:

There is one kind of journalism which directs the affairs of nations;
it makes and unmakes cabinets; it upsets governments, builds
up Navies and does many other great things. It is magnificent. This
is your journalism. There is another kind of journalism which has
no such great ambitions. It is content to plod on, year after year,
giving wholesome and harmless entertainment to crowds of hard-
working people, craving for a little fun and amusement. It is quite
humble and unpretentious. This is my journalism. (Friederichs,
1911: 116–117)

Stead had been the journalistic conduit between these two extremes
but was redundant once he had served his purpose. Passion had
been ousted by the more pragmatic requirements of a commercialized
industry. The dividing point at which he stood is well captured in the
following:

The duty of journalism in the first half of the nineteenth century . . .
was not to discover the truth. The emphasis was on the polemical
power of the writer’s pen. Opinion and commentary were the essence
of good journalism – except in the recording of parliamentary

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activity where accuracy was considered vital . . . By the end of the
century technology and commercial need had elevated accuracy
and reliability, as well as the ability to meet the daily news dead-
lines, to the heart of [the] profession of journalism. (Williams, 1998:
54–55)

The Star

It was this tension between the altruistic and populist ambitions of
journalism which was to shape the continuity of discourses around
newspapers to the present. What had started as a consolidation of
American-influenced journalistic trends was developed by the daily
press in the form of the Star. For all Stead’s campaigning zeal, his was
not a newspaper directed at the masses. He directed his experiments
in the New Journalism squarely at the influential middle classes, the
decision makers in Victorian England. It was the Star which was to
rework the new journalistic techniques in order to fashion a mass
appeal, which was addressed to the working classes, seeking to com-
bine campaigning with radical social perspectives (Conboy, 2002: 99).

Edited by T.P. O’Connor from 1888–1890, the Star was a halfpenny

evening paper which was radical in both its politics and its layout and
a continuation of the accelerating trends of the New Journalism.
O’Connor espoused a brighter method of writing, speed and human
interests. He was also aware of the need for journalism to gain attention
from the reader in an accelerating world:

We live in an age of hurry and of multitudinous newspapers . . .
To get your ideas across through the hurried eyes into the whirling
brains that are employed in the reading of a newspaper there must be
no mistake about your meaning: to use a somewhat familiar phrase,
you must strike your reader right between the eyes. (O’Connor,
1889: 434)

In its opening number on 17 January 1888, it claimed:

The STAR will be a radical journal. It will judge all policy – domes-
tic, foreign, social – from the Radical standpoint. This, in other
words, means that a policy will be esteemed by us good or bad as it
influences for good or evil the lot of the masses of the people . . . In
our view, then, the effect of every policy must first be regarded from
the standpoint of the workers of the nation, of the poorest and most
helpless among them. The charwoman that lives in St Giles, the
seamstress that is sweated in Whitechapel, the labourer that stands
begging for work outside the dockyard gate . . .

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Similar to much of the New Journalism, it was providing shorter
news pieces, lively writing, gossip and human interest and had the
good fortune in terms of its circulation to be launched in time to exploit
the sensation of the Jack the Ripper murders. However, it held out a
promise, which seemed to distinguish it from other daily newspapers,
delivering all this from a perspective which prioritized the interests
and political concerns of the mass of its projected readers. This was a
radical departure indeed for the New Journalism as it genuinely
attempted to align itself with the lives of its readership and not simply
with a rhetorical simulacrum of the language of these readers. On its
first day, it sold 142,600 copies and by 1889 its circulation peaked with
the Ripper story at 360,598. It was the first genuinely popular daily
paper aimed at a mass market but it preceded the market populariza-
tion which Harmsworth inaugurated from 1896 with its crucial
capitalization via the astute exploitation of advertising on a scale not
witnessed before.

The Star was politically radical with human interest on a daily basis

and with a fresh layout, breaking information up much in the style of
the Answers and Tit-bits but with a different, news-orientated content
which distinguished it from these papers. It introduced the Stop Press
and lower case type for its cross-heads and lesser headlines. Williams
indicates the importance of the role of presentation and layout in the
evolving rhetoric of the popular press:

The essential novelty of the Star is that the new distribution of
interest which the second half of the nineteenth century had brought
about was now typographically confirmed. From now on the
‘New Journalism’ began to look what it was. (Williams, 1961: 221)

Goodbody describes the layout thus:

Headlines often went across two columns, cross-heads were used
extensively to break up solid type and leading articles were often
intentionally restricted to half a column . . . Later the Star used
lower case for both secondary headlines and cross-heads, neither of
which had been seen in British newspaper typography although
they had been widespread in the United states. They also varied the
position of broken lines in sub-heads, whereas previously they had
been centred. This technique allowed second headlines which
summarized the substance rather than pointed to the importance of
the article. (Goodbody, 1985: 22)

Above all, journalism in the daily press began to accommodate a more
complete range of human experience: ‘. . . it is the sound principle
to which we shall all come at last in literature and journalism, that

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112

everything that can be talked about can also be written about’ (O’Connor,
1889: 430).

Conclusion

The style of the New Journalism encapsulated the changing relation-
ship between reader and newspaper. Display advertising, sports news,
human interest, fast stories transmitted by telegraph, cheap and increas-
ingly visual newspapers, summary leads and front page news all became
established in England in the 1890s. Many cheaper weekly publica-
tions had introduced some of these features from the 1840s in England
but the New Journalism had brought them to a daily readership. The
newspapers of the late nineteenth century enabled a new conceptual-
ization of the public as an active, engaged entity and extended that
concept through a varied set of strategies which were manifested as let-
ters, editorial identity, leading articles and consumerism targeted
through advertising at specific readerships:

Through the newspaper, readers as well as writers found new ways
to communicate. In consequence, it was possible for them to imag-
ine a public, a constituency beyond the individual, the family or
the locality, an integrated social whole whose cohesion was under-
pinned inter alia by its access to a common stock of regularly
revised knowledge about the world . . . made the nineteenth-
century concept of the public possible. (Jones: 202)

There was more sport, crime, entertainment and less politics, all in a
livelier style, with more emphasis on human interest and laid out more
clearly in an attempt to be more broadly accessible and therefore more
profitable. There was also a commercial imperative to cultivate a con-
sistent voice within these papers. Familiarity bred profit. Salmon
interprets the way in which the ‘discourse of journalism should so
insistently declare its personalized character’ (Salmon, 29), as inevita-
ble at this point in the commercialization of journalism as a simulacrum
standing in for its lack of a relationship with its readers which was in
any way as authentic as some of the Radical or Chartist experiments
had been or even of the Times at the height of its influence with its mid-
Victorian upper-middle-class readership. A political irony with
implications which continue to resonate within popular journalism
today is that as readers were increasingly addressed in a more personal
tone about matters which touched the everyday, they were increasingly
marginalized in these newspapers from politics (Hampton, 2001: 227).

113

Introduction

There were, broadly speaking, two significant shifts in the language
of twentieth-century newspapers. The first was the increasing promi-
nence of the sub-editor in constructing a news style, albeit with various
institutional preferences, which was able to:

Combine one story into another, or perhaps combine running
reports from several news agencies, a handful of correspondents
and half a dozen reporters, to produce a single, intelligible report
from a series of confused or even contradictory messages. (Evans,
1972: 7)

This work enabled the development of news as ‘a form of knowledge in
itself not dependent on other discourses to be able to make statements
about the world’ (Matheson, 2000: 558). Harmsworth’s astute arrange-
ment of the news to fit within and around the advertising copy in the
Daily Mail in plain, easily digested text for the paper’s lower-middle-
class audience was the first demonstration of this innovation in the
status of newspaper language.

The second important shift in the form and scope of newspaper lan-

guage is the emergence of the tabloid as the most influential sub-genre of
journalism of the twentieth century, especially in its elaboration of first, an
appeal to a broadly working-class readership and subsequently its incor-
poration of a more general popular culture. The language and style of first
the popular newspaper in Britain and then the tabloid have had an incre-
mental impact on newspapers generally over the last 100 years. Not only
have broadsheet newspapers been driven for commercial reasons to adopt
a ‘compact’ format but the emphasis and style of the language of these
newspapers have been orientated more towards the news values of the
tabloids as these newspapers all try to emphasize their congruence with
popular culture in an era of unprecedented competition in the media.
It may be, as Bromley and Tumber (1997) have speculated, that after the
gradual convergence of tabloid and broadsheet styles, a re-specialization
may see different newspapers (particularly in their online manifestations)
starting to diverge considerably in their tone, style and coverage once

Tabloid talk: Twentieth-century
template

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114

again. Yet from our perspective, the style of tabloid language was certainly
the story of the twentieth-century newspaper.

The emergence of a distinctive tabloid idiom indicates a shift in the

social parameters of newspaper language. This idiom blends sensation
and a calculated disrespect and suspicion of authority, particularly
political authority within an overall concentration on the broadest
appeal of contemporary popular culture. This chapter will explore the
distinctive nature of this sub-genre of newspaper journalism and reflect
upon the social implications of its attempts to articulate a populist,
media-centric version of contemporary society for a mass readership.
It will root the evolution of tabloid newspapers within the general
history of popular newspapers and assess the intensification of the
rhetoric of social class from the relaunch of the Daily Mirror in the
1930s to the reconfiguration of popular Conservatism in the Sun as a
spokespiece for blue-collar Britain from the 1980s. It will also evaluate
the implications of the spread of tabloid features, emphasis and style to
elite newspapers as they move to compact formats and, in addition, the
adoption of a tabloid ethos by other news media.

New Journalism: Continuities and change

Despite the fact that the popular press of the late Victorian epoch was
one which increasingly marginalized the organized political interests
of working people, it nevertheless sought to articulate a version of their
worldview. This worldview was communicated for commercial reasons
to maximize profits through the perfection of an idiom attractive to the
widest range of the population. Debates around the impact of the Foster
Education Acts of 1870–1871 (Vincent, 1993: 198–199) indicate that
there had been readers able and willing to spend a part of their income
on published material for decades. They were not new readers – they
were a new and profitable readership for a new sort of popular publica-
tion. The evolution of the language of newspapers from the New
Journalism into the first mass daily newspapers in Britain was above all
else a commercial triumph and in particular with its cultural and
generic mix, the first manifestation of a properly mass culture.

Most of the popular press in Britain had by the late nineteenth

century shifted from a radical culture, drawing upon the collective
interests of working people with a view to enable political change, to a
cultural expression whose parameters were set by increasingly market-
orientated interests which had political as well as economic change
securely confined to the accepted tolerances of capitalist markets
(Curran, 1978). Despite its more commercialized tone, the popular press

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had been able to retain an ability to address ordinary people in terms
which

highlighted subjectivity, entertainment and the traditions of

popular miscellany. The production of the new popular newspapers on
the cusp of the twentieth century was slicker, their layout made them
more visually accessible, their distribution was more regular and they
were more attuned to the needs of their advertisers but in all their
novelty they still traded upon the longer traditions of popular print
culture which had already proved their commercial viability. These
publications chose a more effective, dialogic method of control, articu-
lated in terms of reinforcing the political-economic interests of their
owners within a set of formulae able to appeal to the widest and most
profitable market. Increasingly, this readership was addressed in terms
of its commercial potential and its aspirations to middle-class values.

The Daily Mail: A commercial language
for the masses

The distillation of these trends and strategies in newspaper language
and layout came first in a paper which was not tabloid at all. In fact,
it was rather a dignified publication, unsensationalist, with advertise-
ments on the front page to emphasize its respectability and certainly
with no taint of political radicalism. Yet it was the Daily Mail which
created the mass market for newspapers which would set the cultural
scene which would enable the tabloid papers to later extend the experi-
ment with the language of popular appeal. On 4 May 1896, the Daily
Mail was launched as a reader-friendly morning paper aimed at a class
of readers not yet attracted by the daily press. It was priced at a half-
penny and aimed at the lower middle classes, shop workers, secretarial
staff, office workers, clerks and, as its greatest novelty, women readers.
It has been observed that Harmsworth knew from personal experience
that there was a broader interest in a news agenda beyond the narrow
traditions of political newspapers:

He knew it was also what people talked about in the kitchen, par-
lour, drawing room, and over the garden wall; namely, other people
– their failures and successes, their joys and sorrows, their money
and their food, their peccadilloes. The Daily Mail was thus the first
to cater for women readers. (Graves and Hodge, 1971: 55)

This female orientation was achieved by including more material which
imitated the print culture which had been demonstrably popular with
women readers since the early nineteenth century – the weekly maga-
zine. The Mail’s daily magazine which included a specific Women’s

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Column soon expanded to a whole page. Woman’s World in an early experi-
mental edition of the paper on Saturday, 22 February 1896 included:

When Love Begins to Wane; Sponge Cake; What do your eyes say?
Fortune Telling Teacups; The Jewel For Each Month; Your
Character From Handwriting.

The Daily Mail’s main change was the way in which it shaped the
newspaper’s content to fit the space available. Its captions allowed the
gist of an article to be taken in at a glance and the brevity of the pieces
added to the overall impression of space in composition and variety in
content. The language of this journalism needed to be made to fit the
new layout and compartmentalization of stories which meant that the
role of the sub-editor was of paramount importance; copy had to be
pruned and adapted to fit within the space between the illustration,
headlines and advertising. However, the tight control of length of item
and the cutting of stories to fit space also enabled opinion to be more
subtly incorporated into the editorial process through the language
structure thus increasing the possibility of ‘slanting the news by empha-
sis or omission to suit the political views of the proprietor’ (Clarke,
2004: 265).

Its advertising slogan in the early days was a call to an ambition for

cut-price self-improvement characteristic of the epoch and the class of
its readers:

THE PENNY PAPER FOR A HALFPENNY

Having learned from the profitable publishing experience of Newnes,
for whom Harmsworth had worked in his early days as a freelance
contributor to Tit-Bits, and backed by the fortune he had amassed
through his Answers to Correspondents with the addition of a keen
appreciation of the importance of the link between advertising, capital
investment and circulation, the new paper was an immediate commer-
cial success. He had also learnt from the ways in which the Star had
been able to appeal by its concentration on the lighter aspects of life but
had jettisoned its radical politics. Popular appeal was to be articulated
as commercial momentum not as the platform for radical reform. By
1900 its circulation had almost reached the million mark and the era of
the mass-circulation daily newspaper had arrived in Britain.

Its first leader encapsulates the appeal of this combination of

technology, value for money and a well-identified readership:

. . . the note of the Daily Mail is not so much economy of price as
conciseness and compactness. It is essentially the busy man’s paper
. . . Our stereotyping arrangements, engines, and machines are of
the latest English and American construction, and it is the use of

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these inventions on a scale unprecedented in any English news-
paper office that enables the Daily Mail to effect a saving of from 30
to 50 per cent, and to be sold for half the price of its competitors.

The newspaper was presented as being not cheap but a bargain. It was
conservative in its politics and layout, with advertisements on the front
page and was ideal for the commuter. The short articles, clearly laid
out, were written in order to have a breadth of appeal – a commercial as
well as a textual achievement and one which became a hallmark of the
construction of this type of popularity. The front page of the Daily Mail
came to include regular, light items such as GOSSIP OF THE DAY, OUR
SHORT STORY, SOME INTERESTING ITEMS, LAST LOOK ROUND
and was traditional to the extent that it did not focus heavily on news.
The reports from the London Courts on page 3 entitled, ON THE SEAMY
SIDE are a direct continuation of the tradition of Cleave’s Weekly Police
Gazette and other Sunday papers. Fashions, the personalities behind
the news, a more conversationally based style of news were all features
of Harmsworth’s appropriation of the style and content of the New
Journalism. It complemented its commercial appeal with an influential
form of populist chauvinism combining in Engel’s words: ‘triumphalism
. . . xenophobia . . . and, of course, crime . . . in about equal proportions’
(Engel, 1996: 60). This reached an early peak during the Boer War
(1899–1902). It placed itself at the centre of popular enthusiasms and
events such as Exhibitions, the relief of Mafeking in the Boer War and
Royal events. The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated on 23 June
1897 and was feted by none in more effusive patriotic terms than the
Daily Mail’s eulogy:

We ought to be a proud nation today, proud of our fathers who
founded this empire, proud of ourselves who have kept and
increased it, proud of our sons, whom we can trust to keep what we
hand down and increase it for their sons.

Catherine Hughes (Hughes, 1986: 187) has argued that it was the speed
of production, distribution and reaction to popular opinion which
began to unravel the more sedate cultural patterns of the previous era,
following popular impulses and threading new patterns around narra-
tives of empire and the place of the people in that project. It was this
new form of the mass popular newspaper which for the first time, on a
daily basis, was incorporating the people as readers into the imperial
project within a technologically influenced stylistics which came to
maturity in the material presentation of this newspaper. Harmsworth
was first to conceive the idea of a mass-circulation daily, ‘to bring the
proud and vital spirit of empire to the breakfast tables of the queen’s
fiercely loyal, lower-middle-class subjects (Hughes, 1986: 200). National

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narratives were commercially attractive to a newspaper aiming for a
nation-wide audience bolstered in its self-regard by association with
empire and the possession of overseas territories again exemplified in
an early prototype:

OUR BIRTHDAY
Four hundred years ago today the foundation stone of the British
Empire was laid On March 5 1496, Henry VII granted the petition of
John Cabot and his three sons, of Bristol, and on the same day the
Privy Seal was attached to a charter granting these four bold mari-
ners liberty to hoist the English flag on shores hitherto unknown
to Christian people, and to acquire the sovereignty of them for
England . . . Today that flag flutters in the eye of the sun at every
hour of his endless march from day to day, and bounds have been set
to the British Empire by the limitations of terrestrial space . . . That
England has done so well in the race for empire, and has secured the
pick of colonial locations all over the world is due to the fact that we
started early and worked manfully before Europe had grown too big
for its peoples, and for this our race may thank the hardy pioneers
whose charter we commemorate today. (5 March 1896)

The commonsensical, low-key populism of the new newspaper was to
be modelled on the conversational intimacy modelled on Newnes’s
journalism (Campbell, 2001) which in turn was a direct appropriation,
for a British market, of the commercialized popular idiom from
America. This conversational tone can be illustrated by reference to a
report on a meeting with a man recently back from the Cape province
which on 21 February 1896 ran under the following heading:

Is Kruger Toppling?
A Chat with an Englishman just returned from Johannesburg

Goodbody has suggested that in terms of targeting a popular readership,
Harmsworth: ‘. . . did not lead or follow the public mood, he accompa-
nied it’ (Goodbody, 1985: 24) and this certainly matches the longer term
trend within the language of popular newspapers observed by Hampton
(2004) in the shift from an emphasis on education to the representation
of increasingly well-defined and commercially targeted readers.

Despite the fact that Harmsworth’s revolution had not been a tabloid

one, he was instrumental in the development of the new format.
Harmsworth and Pulitzer collaborated on producing a one-off tabloid
edition of the New York World on 1 January 1901. Its 32 pages were
half the size of the normal newspaper. Its joint editors dubbed it a
‘tabloid’ newspaper and heralded it presciently as the ‘newspaper of
the twentieth century’ (Mott, 1962: 666–667). In 1903, Harmsworth

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launched his own Daily Mirror in a tabloid format but one with a
specific appeal to women readers. Unlike later experiments with the
genre, it was not to prove a success in this guise. The success of the
Daily Mail triggered the appearance of a rival in the Daily Express from
1900 which consistently concentrated the American novelty of news
on the first page for the first time successfully in a British mass-market
daily morning newspaper from 1901, after the incorporation of the
Morning which had championed this format, and which drew on the
expertise of expatriate American Blumenfeld: ‘grafting my American
branch on the British oak’ (Blumenfeld, 1944: 102–112). Arthur Pearson’s
instruction to his journalists on the Daily Express, to ‘never forget the
cabman’s wife’, was executed by Blumenfeld who became a forceful
interpreter of American methods to a nation still genuinely reluctant to
seize the bit (Wiener, 1996: 72–73).

The story of the popular newspaper in Britain in the period up to the

outbreak of World War II is a fascinating manifestation of the way in
which a popular rhetoric developed through the competing efforts of
four daily newspapers to attract and keep an increasing share of readers
and to inspire them with their particular version of popular reality. The
developments of the 1930s can be categorized as part of the continuum
that was the New Journalism; perfecting the pattern of a commercially
attractive popular journalism. The 1930s was the defining decade for
the direction of popular daily newspapers in Britain. It was the period
of greatest expansion in terms of sales and readers and of the commer-
cialization of the popular newspaper markets. The popular daily press
of this period also successfully assimilated two traditional English
newspaper formats – the illustrated newspaper and the popular
Sunday paper (Williams, 1961: 231).

The Daily Herald: A left-leaning alternative

The only popular paper which steered away from a commercially
dominated course until the 1930s was the Daily Herald which had
started as a strike sheet founded by print workers in 1911 and had been
turned into a daily newspaper supporting the position of the Trades
Unions in 1912 by George Lansbury and Ben Tillett. In 1922, it was
taken over by the Trades Union Congress (TUC). The Herald was, accord-
ing to Bingham (2004), dedicated to expounding the ‘workers’ perspective’
against the ‘dope’ peddled by the ‘capitalist press’ ( Bingham, 2004: 42).

The paper was relaunched on 17 March 1930 and its circulation grew

almost immediately from a quarter of a million to a million, beginning
to rival the ‘big two’, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail. Reporting its

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own success in its initial offer for a renewed and extensive version of
insurance for subscribers, it claimed:

RUSH TO REGISTER FOR £10,000 INSURANCE
DAILY HERALD SCHEME WITH BENEFITS FOR ALL. (18 March
1930)

The conditions of the Herald’s sale to Odhams Press included a contin-
ued commitment to TUC perspectives so that the new version of the
newspaper contained explicit calls to the tradition of Labour and Trades
Union politics in the press and attempts to forge a solidarity with its
readers based on its adherence to that tradition:

FORWARD!
  Today the ‘Daily Herald’ appears in a new suit. The spirit and
purpose behind it remain unchanged.
  For years we have been the official exponent of the views of the
great British Labour and Trade Union Movement. That high
position we are proud to hold today . . .
  We say to our readers old and new. Here is your newspaper.
Much has been done in the past. A great deal lies ahead. Let us
march. (17 March 1930)

Its political message was often uncompromising and written from such
a clear Socialist perspective of political involvement that it constituted
a radically different choice to any of its daily popular competitors:

DISCIPLINE
  We print today a letter from Mr Josiah Wedgewood, M.P. on the
burning issue of discipline in the Parliamentary Labour Party. But we
find it somewhat hard to discover what it is that he recommends.
  What are the limits of individual liberty within an organised
Party whose very existence depends on loyalty and discipline?
  This is no abstract question, no plaything for theorists. It is vital
and urgent, primary and ultimate.
  On the answer to it depends the survival of the Labour Govern-
ment and that whole complex of social progress for which the
government stands. (25 March 1930)

Its great skill included being able to take features which had become
popularized in the daily press of the early century and give them a slant
which tilted them more towards a politically engaged viewpoint. This
is illustrated by the use of medical opinion on the condition of factory
workers in an opinion column which calls on the expert opinion of
Dr Marion Phillips:

TALKING IT OVER
Where the Sun is Shut Out!
Factory Workers Who Miss Tonic of Spring. (23 March 1930)

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121

The stress of many of its rags-to-riches stories was on the ordinariness
of the recipients of good fortune and sometimes, more interestingly, in
a departure from the melodramatic interventions of fate, these stories
contained potential for individuals to improve their lot through hard
work in a meritocratic society:

PROMOTION FROM THE LOWER DECK
REAL CHANCES FOR EVERY BOY
How to open still wider the road to promotion for all classes in the
Navy is to be examined by the Admiralty. (24 March 1930)

There remained also an element of the sensationalist exotica of the day
on offer in its rivals:

The Truth Behind the Dope Peril By G. W. L. Day
WORLD-WIDE DRUG SYNDICATES
POISON FLOOD (18 March 1930)

A selection of front-page headlines indicate a distinctive set of news
values even at this time of intensifying competition with the Daily
Express and Daily Mail:

THE TRUTH BEHIND THE DEARER BACON PRICES SCANDAL
FOREIGN EXPORTERS POCKET £5,000,000 (23 August 1930)

MINERS SHOT FOR THE ROOSEVELT CODE
Men Strike to Assert Their Right To Organise
WOMEN GASSED AND MAN KILLED
OWNERS’ GANGS FIRE ON STRIKERS (2 August 1930)

The Daily Mail: Responding to competition

The Daily Mail did not want to be left out in the race to improve its
visual attractiveness to the expanding reading public. It too considered
that the new potential of typographic developments and illustration
needed to be harnessed to the continuing tradition of the newspaper’s
popular appeal. There were many aspects of the paper, which, despite
its new livery, were rooted in its traditional set of values and the char-
acteristic tone of appeal to its particular mass readership. Its slogan, for
example, remained ‘For King and Empire’, boasting its profoundly
loyalist and imperial perspectives. The paper still promoted itself as
the ‘world’s greatest advertising medium’ and as if to reinforce that
claim, it still persevered with a predominance of advertising on its first
page. The sections: ‘Looking at Life’ and ‘Court and Society’ were aspi-
rational in tone. Its appeal to women was as strong as before and was
based on the successful and popular formula of questions and answers

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122

on dress, cookery, children and the nursery, beauty, housewifery in a
daily feature entitled,

‘DAILY MAIL’ WOMEN’S BUREAU

The relaunch of the Daily Express

The Daily Express did not, in its response, attempt to target a specific
social class. There seemed to be little call for such a product as there
was clearly still mileage for editorial and advertisers in trying to pro-
vide a more general cross-class appeal, drawing upon American
precedents. Arthur Christiansen, the editor of the Daily Express in its
most successful era between 1933 and 1957, required that news reports
should be accessible to the whole spectrum of society:

I tried to simplify news in such a way that it would be interesting
to the permanent secretary of the Foreign office and to the char-
woman who brushed his office floor in the morning. (Christiansen,
1961: 147)

The summer of 1933 marked a significant breakthrough in popular
newspapers in Britain with editor Christiansen’s revolutionary match-
ing of layout to the broader popular agenda in the Daily Express. He
produced a paper with cleaner print, which was better spaced, had
more and bigger headlines and cross-headings to break up the page into
more accessible sections. This was the turning point – accessibility.
The new typography and layout constituted as important a part of pop-
ular rhetoric as the content of the newspaper or the language in which
it was couched. The catalogue of popular disaster and crime which had
remained a staple of popular print culture is well represented here but
in a much more attractive layout, inviting the eye to peruse the head-
lines and catch more of the story at a glance:

Girl ‘Duellist’ On Stiletto Death
BOY SHOWN TRICK OF STABBING
SHE OFFERS HER BLOOD FOR HIM – TOO LATE (22 August
1933)

Unemployment, a major feature of the time, makes its way into the
paper on 22 August 1933. The front page announces that this will be a
series of articles looking at the issue from the inside:

What Do The Unemployed Think? – 1
A WORKLESS MAN LAYS BARE HIS SOUL

However, this is a sentimental account relying on the New Journalism’s
subjective interview techniques to bring the issue of unemployment to

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the fore. It steers clear of radical solutions and displays in the person of
the unemployed man, a scepticism of those in power. Ultimately it is a
philanthropic and rather defeatist attitude which lingers in the mind.
The issue is raised but the causes of mass unemployment and the polit-
ical solutions to the problem take second place to the rather maudlin,
sensationalized representation of the ‘workless man’. This version of
popular journalism was able to fashion an escapist version of reality to
counter much of the gloom of the period. At the same time as mass
unemployment threatened increasing numbers of ordinary people, the
Daily Express was highlighting coverage of the glamour and sensation
of high-society in William Hickey’s gossip column: ‘These Names Make
NEWS’.

The Daily Express was rapidly becoming the perfect contemporary

vehicle for portraying the news of the day and a great deal else beside
in a language and format accessible to the general reader. The world of
the economic depression in Europe was not closely scrutinized. The
gaze of the reader was distracted elsewhere into the miscellany of pop-
ular escapism. The status quo was fine by the Daily Express and it
appeared to go along with the notion that the world was in the safe
hands of trusted politicians and businessmen. It also had little truck
with radical solutions and presented the ordinary reader with an asser-
tive view of the middle-class aspirations of working people.

The Daily Mirror : Commercializing the working
classes

For all the success of these papers in attracting the broadest range of
lower-middle-class popular readers, it was the Daily Mirror which was
to define and then dominate the tabloid market with a language of spe-
cifically proletarian appeal (Bingham and Conboy, 2009). By 1934 the
circulation of the Daily Mirror was falling towards an unacceptably low
700,000. Its readers were predominantly the metropolitan, middle class
who might be better served by the Express and the Mail: ‘retired colo-
nels, dowagers, professional gentlemen and schoolmistresses’ . . .
Cudlipp called it the ‘Daily Sedative’ (Cudlipp, 1953: 64). It was decided
that something had to be done to revive the financial fortunes of the
newspaper within an increasingly competitive popular market. It had
been identified that there was an imbalance with more right-wing news-
papers than the market could sustain (Pugh, 1998: 426). Furthermore,
the existing left-of-centre newspapers consisted of more serious-minded
and party affiliated publications such as the Daily Herald, Daily Worker
and the Liberal News Chronicle. A newspaper which could encompass
a broader appeal to a working-class audience and spice it up with

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124

entertainment, humour and engagement with the lived experiences of
readers could find a vacant position in the market. The success of the
relaunched Daily Mirror was built on a formula based on two American
tabloids, the New York Daily Mirror and Daily News, skilfully adapted
to a British cultural context and combined with the advice of an
American advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson. The old Northcliffe
formula of the telegraphic sentence was deployed in a modern layout
(Edelman, 1966: 40). The guiding light behind this was its editorial
director Harry Guy Bartholomew who introduced the heavy black type,
which was to distinguish the Mirror from all its competitors from his
first year in charge. Its ‘Tabloid Revolution’ of 1934–1937 had begun
but it still needed to find an authentic voice to match its bold appear-
ance. Engel has described its new-found appeal under his stewardship
in the following terms:

In the fuggy atmosphere of a bare-floored pre-war pub, the Mirror
was the intelligent chap leaning on the counter of the bar: not lah-
di-dah or anything – he liked a laugh, and he definitely had an eye
for the girls – but talking a lot of common sense. (Engel, 1996: 161)

It soon began to pick up in terms of circulation but it was the crucial
factor of its identity, its ambition to articulate the broad interests of the
working classes, which was to take longer to develop. Edelman has tried
to capture something of the man trusted with expressing that identity:

Though the ‘Establishment’ was still an object of reverence, ‘Bart’,
as everyone called him, was against it. Long before the aristocracy
and its imitators in Britain recognized that their authority was
crumbling, Bart spontaneously pointed out to the millions of work-
ing-class and lower middle-class readers of the Mirror that they
mattered, that many of the old accepted and snobbish values were
bunk, that stuffed prigs should not be taken at their self-assessment,
and that you didn’t have to be a public school man to have worth-
while views. (Edelman, 1966: 38)

It became a daily popular newspaper which articulated the views and
aspirations of the working classes and perfected a vernacular style
which transmitted that solidarity even if it was in an intensely com-
mercialized form. A key element in this construction of a working-class
voice was the use of letters such as ‘Viewpoint’, ‘Live Letters’, ‘Star let-
ter’ and later the ‘Old Codgers’ replies to these letters as a barometer of
readers’ views. Also key to its development of a demotic printed
language, were the columns of Cassandra (William Connor) who pro-
vided an abrasive, populist political edge which railed against
unemployment and appeasement and the complacency of the ruling
classes in a language able to provoke debate and stir up passions.

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125

The sensationalist headline which Christiansen had done much to
develop in the broadsheet Daily Express was to be extended by this
language into a weapon of both sensation and later popular indigna-
tion. Headlines of the 1930s which Cudlipp himself recalls penning
include those which were characteristic of the new edge to the tabloid
journalism of the Daily Mirror in the 1930s:

I AM THE WOMAN YOU PITY
REVELLER VANISHES FOR DAYS -
COMES BACK AS POP-EYED DRAGON
SHOUTING ‘WHOOPEE! WHAT A NIGHT!’ (Cudlipp, 1953: 80)

Capturing the voice of the people

It was during World War II that the Daily Mirror was able to take up the
mantle as spokesperson of the ordinary people with a hunger for
radical change in favour of their interests and against the damaging
social and political complacencies of the pre-war era. Without hyper-
bole, Cudlipp can claim that it became: ‘. . . the newspaper of the masses,
the Bible of the Services’ rank and file, the factory worker and the
housewife’ (1953: 136).

In the words of historian A.J.P. Taylor it constituted a:

. . . serious organ of democratic opinion [which] gave an indication
as never before what ordinary people in the most ordinary sense
were thinking. The English people at last found their voice. (Taylor,
1976: 548–549)

Much of its credibility was derived, in the early war years, from the
astute identification of the inefficiencies of the bureaucrats and their
hindrance of the war effort. Cassandra’s crusade against ‘Army foolery’,
for instance, managed to continually strike a popular chord which was
patriotic at the same time as it was disturbing for the wartime leaders.
He carried it off because the readers genuinely recognized the problems
which he identified in the many cosy preconceptions of hierarchy and
protocol in British society. In stark contrast to much of the conservative
individualism of populist appeal in the press of the 1930s or the
sublimation of workers into the imperial effort, there is a decisive shift
to a collective and a working-class perspective in the Daily Mirror.
On 11 May 1945 it adopted the slogan:

FORWARD WITH THE PEOPLE

This emphasis culminated in its coverage of the lead-up to voting in the
1945 General Election. In a stroke of populist genius, the paper began a
campaign of power and subtlety – not mentioning the name of the

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126

Labour party but focusing on the experiences and memories of ordinary
people as a repository of folk memory. The catch-phrase was memora-
ble and convincing:

I’LL VOTE FOR HIM (5 June 1945)

The people and the nation are merged in a vision of radical change for
the benefit of both. An editorial on July 4 reads:

THE ONE OR THE MANY
. . . When people all over the country go to the polls tomorrow for
whom will they be voting? Not for this party or that, not for one
leader as against another, not to express appreciation or gratitude.
They will be voting for themselves. They will be voting to express
confidence in their own view of the kind of world they desire to
live in. They will be voting for the policies which they believe are
likely to bring such a world into existence. This election is a
national issue, not a personal one.

Post 1945, the Daily Mirror continued to articulate the aspirations of the
class of reader which had emerged from the war with a strong sense of
social solidarity and a determination that things would change to the
benefit of the ordinary people. At this point, only the Daily Mirror and
the Daily Sketch were technically tabloids but the style had been gain-
ing in influence since the 1930s in the popular market. Popular
journalism with the Daily Mirror comes to mean a combination of style
(including layout) – mass circulation – and address (rhetorical/content)
as never before. The Daily Mirror with its astute identification of a rep-
resentational style and above all the voice to match that constituency
was to continue to play a key part is that evolution through the 1950s as
it overtook the Daily Express in 1949 and by 1967 had reached the still
unmatched pinnacle of 5.25 million daily sales (Tunstall, 1996: 43–45).

Its continued success was rooted in the ‘successful projection of

personality’ of which Fairlie wrote in 1957 describing the ‘Old Codgers’
section of the letters page:

No other feature in British journalism so superbly creates the atmos-
phere of a public bar, in which everyone sits cosily round the
scrubbed deal tables, arguing the toss about anything which happens
to crop up, while the Old Codgers buy pints of mixed for the dads,
and ports and lemon for the dear old mums. (Fairlie, 1957: 11)

Bolam as editor of Mirror (1948–1953) staked a claim for the linkage of
sensation and public service, which continues to inform much of the
popular tabloids’ self-image (Rhoufari, 2000; Deuze, 2005):

We believe in the sensational presentation of news and views, as a
necessary and valuable public service . . . Sensationalism does not

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mean distorting the truth. It means the vivid and dramatic presenta-
tion of events so as to give them a forceful impact on the mind of the
reader. It means big headlines, vigorous writing, simplification into
familiar everyday language, and the wide use of illustration by
cartoon and photograph. (Daily Mirror, 30 July 1949: 1)

From 1953, Cudlipp was editor-in-chief and editorial director of both
Mirror and Pictorial; according to Geoffrey Goodman, he transformed
‘the feelings, attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, romantic aspirations and
illusions, nostalgic dreams and awkward-squad absurditites of the
postwar masses into a kind of national common currency’ (Greenslade,
2003: 59). Yet, the language which it used to maintain coherence in
this articulation of its readership into the 1950s and 1960s has been
criticized by Smith as having ‘stylized working class language into
parody . . .’ (Smith, 1975: 238) and he was not alone in decrying the
popular press as culpable in a cultural drift from authentic representa-
tion of the voice and interest of the working classes. Richard Hoggart’s
Uses of Literacy denounced a sensational, sex and entertainment-
obsessed popular press for its part in destroying a serious working-class
culture sustained by the ‘old broad-sheets’ (Hoggart, 1958).

The Sun: A blue-collar vernacular for the new right

The most significant, recent development in the history of British
tabloid newspapers was the relaunch of the Sun in 1969. Thomas has
summarized the epoch-defining pitch for a new, downmarket popular
newspaper in Murdoch’s conviction that the Mirror had become too
highbrow for its readers by the 1960s and, with former Daily Mirror jour-
nalist Larry Lamb, he set out to produce an alternative that was explicitly
based on an updated version of their rival’s irreverent approach of previ-
ous decades (Thomas, 2005: 72). The Sun targeted younger readers,
dropped the serious ambition of the Mirror, embraced the permissi veness
of the age and provided a disrespectful, anti-establishment, entertain-
ment-driven agenda. It reinforced its popular credentials by exploiting
television advertising and an intensified interest in the off and on-screen
activities of the characters in soap operas on British television. Greenslade
has summed up its impact in the following overview:

. . . the Sun had shown that there was an audience for softer, fea-
tures-based material and heavily angled news in which comment
and reporting were intertwined. It also adopted a more idiosyn-
cratic agenda, presenting offbeat stories that fell outside the remit of
broadcast news producers. It cultivated brashness, deliberately
appealing to the earthier interests – and possibly, baser instincts –
of a mass working-class audience. (Greenslade, 2003: 337)

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It was the ability of the Sun to transform the language of populist appeal
away from the Mirror’s left-leaning progressive brand of politics to a
new articulation of the sentiments and policies of the right which pro-
vided the Sun with its trump card, employing Walter Terry, former
political editor of the right-wing Daily Mail, and Ronnie Spark
to

provide a demotic language to shape the editorial ambition for

Murdoch/Lamb’s shift to the right in 1978. In the 1970s and 1980s the
Tories gained the support of the Sun (Negrine: 1994) which had become
synchronized with the aspirations and identities of the classes which
had been credited with the swing to Thatcher in the 1979 election. This
represented an astute mapping of the newspaper’s idiom onto the hege-
monic shift to the ideological project of the Conservative Party in
government. Its effect was contagious to many areas of the press, with
its rabid anti-union stance becoming a perspective maintained by most
of the national newspaper press (Marr, 2005: 169). It soon perfected a
style of vernacular address which highlighted the perceived interests of
a newly empowered blue-collar conservatism. This was however
nothing new: ‘Ever since its birth, the popular press has bolstered capi-
talism by encouraging acquisitive, materialistic and individualistic
values’ (Seymour-Ure, 2000: 23).

Kelvin MacKenzie, the editor from 1981 encapsulated this new mood

perfectly. His preferred slogan was ‘Shock and Amaze on Every Page’
(Chippendale and Horrie, 1992: 332) as he displayed bombastic and
hyperbolic language on all aspects of life in Britain and beyond. Fiercely
patriotic and a staunch supporter of the Conservative Prime Minister,
he was always unequivocally supportive of British military involve-
ment. This was demonstrated most infamously by its jingoistic coverage
in the Falklands: ‘GOTCHA: Our lads sink gunboat and hole cruiser’
(4 May 1982). The paper adopted ‘Maggie’, feted British soldiers as
‘our boys’ and ran front-page headlines redolent of popular speech
as never before: SCUM OF THE EARTH – KINNOCK’S PARTY OF
PLONKERS – SUPERSTAR MAGGIE IS A WOW AT WEMBLEY – 70,
80, 90 PHEW WOT A SCORCHER! It was, furthermore, able to extend
itself into more extreme examples of parody for its amused readership
and in the process possibly contributed to a more general process of
political trivialization:

WHY I’M BACKING KINNOCK, BY STALIN (Sun, 1 June 1987)

Finding a language for sexuality

Changing times had brought with them changing attitudes to public
discussions of sexuality. The Sun managed to articulate the resonance

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of Hunt’s ‘permissive populism’ (1998) of the 1970s and 1980s. Once
the veneer of didacticism had been stripped away (Bingham, 2009),
public discussion of the direct and vicarious pleasures of sexuality
became commonplace within a language of vulgar celebration best
epitomized by the descriptions of the Page 3 Girl – ‘Cor!’; ‘Wot a
Scorcher!’; ‘Stunner!’. It provided a language appealing to women as
part of a broader celebration of heterosexual pleasure for ordinary
people. ‘We Enjoy Life and We Want You To Enjoy It With Us’ announced
the first ‘Pacesetters’ section for women (Sun, 17 November 1969: 14).
Holland (1983) has provided a subtle reading of how the news agenda
of the paper and its raucous appeal formed part of a linguistic endorse-
ment of the power of pleasure in the lives of working-class readers,
presenting itself as the champion of sexual liberation albeit of a particu-
larly narrow, heterosexual, male-dominated variety.

This sexualization of the language of what soon became the most

popular and most influential newspaper in Britain became even more
pronounced in a more intensely competitive market. It seemed as if, as
Snoddy has discussed (1992), the race was on to find the bottom of the
barrel in terms of public tolerance. The Daily Star, launched in 1978,
beat the Sun by a short head in the plummet towards the lowest toler-
ance point in the late 1980s in the sexualization of popular culture
(Holland, 1998). It attempted to provide the Sun with its nemesis but it
failed and has been described as having, ‘a circus layout that fairly
burst from the pages . . . the paper used more italics, more reverses,
and more graphics in conjunction with sensational heads and stories to
give a sense of excitement and power’ (Taylor, 1992: 45). Its limited
success meant that with sales falling and advertisers withdrawing
contracts by the early 1990s, the paper withdrew from its policy of ‘bonk
journalism’, thus demonstrating that continuous coarsening of their
language does not guarantee success for the next generation of popular
newspapers.

Declining deference: Royalty

The diminishing deference within British society in the postwar era
was perfectly articulated in the popular press, especially the tabloids
and this found early expression in attitudes to the monarchy. A greater
aggressiveness in royal journalism was first demonstrated in the matter
of Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend. On 14 June
1953 a particularly controversial headline captured the new-found
assertiveness of the popular newspaper to the royal family when the
Daily Mirror urged: ‘Come On Margaret! Please make Up Your Mind’
(19 August 1953). At least they said, ‘please’ at this point!

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The Daily Mirror ran a poll on whether Princess Margaret and

Townsend should marry or not and the Press Council was hugely
critical of the paper’s coverage as were conservative newspapers such
as the Times and the Daily Telegraph but there was no going back. As a
supplement to this in the 1970s, the romantic saga of Prince Charles’s
courtships were to provide the first sustained taste of the new lack of
deference towards the monarchy. The stories peaked in the 1990s with
the colourful and controversial adventures of Diana, Princess of Wales,
but there were still notable stories beyond the 1990s as tabloids became
more desperate than ever to milk Royal scandal or even fabricate it to
boost sales such as in the ‘Spy in the Palace’ coup by the Daily Mirror
and the Burrell affair (Coward, 2007).

Tabloidization: The permeation of the popular

We may consider that the list of trends associated with tabloidization
constitutes the newspaper’s major contemporary alteration. Yet no
matter how great the impact of the tabloid style has been in the popular
press, it is in the migration of its characteristics to other media where it
continues to have greatest relevance to contemporary debates. Tabloidi-
zation may refer to an increase in news about celebrities, entertainment,
lifestyle features, personal issues, an increase in sensationalism, in the
use of pictures and sloganized headlines, vulgar language and a
decrease in international news, public affairs news including politics,
the reduction in the length of words in a story and the reduction of
the complexity of language and also a convergence with agendas of
popular and in particular television culture. It is clearly, if nothing
else, a composite growl-list of elements, some of which have haunted
the minds of commentators on journalism over centuries. It is because
of this lack of specificity that Sparks (2000) questions whether tabloidi-
zation is a useful diagnostic tool at all but he does concede that the
debate itself is an indication of a specifically contemporary set of
worries over the nature of journalism across media. Popular tabloid
newspapers are primarily constructed through a combination of format
and language: ‘editorial matter is presented in emotive language in
easy-to-consume formats’ (Rooney, 2000: 91). Tabloid tendencies to
sensationalize headlines and to cross-reference celebrity and enter-
tainment issues can increasingly be seen in the elite press and other
news media as an attempt to reach new audiences in a crowded market
and a changing cultural environment.

The first trend within tabloidization is the literal transformation of

broadsheets to tabloid format; from Mail in 1971 to the Independent in

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131

2003. The second is the spread of the tabloid style and news values to
the elite press. McLachlan and Golding (2000) chart that the growth in
visuals in relation to text is one indicator of tabloidization, squeezing
text out of the frame. Bromley observed this trend as it gathered momen-
tum through the 1990s:

At first, the ‘quality’ press ignored the substantive issues of tabloid
news; then decried them. These papers . . . subsequently began
reporting and commenting on the behaviour of the tabloid press,
which led to the vicarious reporting of the issues themselves. Finally,
the broadsheet papers, too, carried the same news items. (1998: 31)

Thomas (2005) argues that there is a direct connection between

aspects of the development of tabloid newspapers’ language and their
reporting of politics which has drifted into the elite press especially as
they have increasingly depended on the populist techniques of the tab-
loids to maintain their place in an increasingly competitive market.
This has meant a move away from balanced reporting, positive, politi-
cian-centred propaganda to a more negative, journalist-dominated
approach and to one-story front pages, screaming headlines and short,
punchy campaigning prose at the expense of more detailed text or long
quotations from politicians. In this sense, Thomas claims, the tabloid
medium certainly has affected the message, and has arguably impacted
not just on the popular press but the wider reporting culture as well
(Thomas, 2005: 154–155).

Readers have become more than ever constructed by the newspapers

in terms of consumerism than active engagement in politics (McGuigan,
1993: 178) meaning that political news has become simply another part
of the scandal/entertainment industry (Franklin, 1997 2004) and a
glance at the activities and sound-bite oriented reporting of the main-
stream television news channels shows the extent to which the ‘reductive
language’ (Seymour-Ure, 1996: 222) of the popular tabloids have
migrated. Fairclough (1995b) and Fowler (1991) observe a movement in
news media towards what they term a ‘conversationalisation’ of public
language including political language while Marr concludes that the
consequent tone of mocking scepticism adopted almost as a contempo-
rary default has eroded the credibility of democracy (Marr, 2005: 71).

Yet the influence of tabloid techniques on the language of the elite

press has not been uniformly negative, as Greenslade implies when
praising the success of the editor of the Guardian from the 1970s in
appealing to a young, professional readership:

The key to Preston’s success stemmed in part from his subtle adop-
tion and adaptation of tabloid techniques. He realised the importance

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132

of ‘selling’ the stories, the virtues of brevity and the benefits of
being proactive in both news-gathering and features selection.
(Greenslade, 2003: 428)

Rusbridger (2005) has highlighted that the future of the quality press
will be determined in large part by the way that it responds to the pres-
sures of the commercialized, tabloidized market and McNair sees
changes in the content and style of the elite press as a positive move
towards a more inclusive even democratic culture: ‘Less pompous, less
pedagogic, less male, more human, more vivacious, more demotic’
(McNair, 2003: 50).

The third characteristic is the crossover of tabloid style and news

values to other media.

As the tabloid newspapers decline in direct sales they are neverthe-

less, and perhaps this in part explains their slow demise, exporting
their stylistic traits to other parts of the newspaper press and to televi-
sion news media in general (Barnett and Gaber, 2001; Barnett, Seymour
and Gaber, 2000).

As the tabloid newspaper draws to a large extent on the patterns and

the traditions of working-class entertainment, it is an obvious source of
material for a wider range of products in a media world dominated by
popular entertainment values. It is more connected to everyday life and
tends to relegate the serious to a secondary place and foreground the
carnival and the colloquial (Conboy, 2006: 212). Carnival, for Bakhtin,
was: ‘the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and
prohibitions’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 10) and represented the participation in
the overturning of orders of hierarchy by the common people them-
selves. Popular tabloid newspapers, and their generic offspring, are
able, at their most successful, to blend the attractiveness of these fea-
tures of the culture of the ordinary people and their perceptions of a
utopian alternative to their daily existence and represent them as part
of their everyday lives. The strategic importance of the language of
these transactions is hard to underestimate. Bakhtin’s ‘carnivalesque’ is
the temporary suspension of hierarchies of status, taste, behaviour,
while it allows a utopian glimpse of a community of plenty, freedom,
creativity. Its uncrownings and inversions, the transformations into a
new existence, unfettered by the exigencies of the everyday are, in the
tabloids, returned into a cycle which redirects these impulses back into
a circle of consumption and commodification. The transformations are
imagined via the reflected glories of celebrity, the uncrownings particu-
larly of celebrities as politicians and sports stars are channelled into a
cycle of elevation and reduction. It is because the popular tabloids can

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133

maintain and mutate this cultural mode of the carnivalesque that they
retain their success although it is a triumph of genre over content in
that it does not allow the radical contestations of social or economic
hierarchies envisaged by Bakhtin’s analysis to emerge. Throughout his-
tory, carnival has served to keep alive alternative conceptions of life
and power relations. In the popular tabloids, we have a ventriloquized
version of the freedom and laughter of Bakhtin’s carnival table talk. It is
a carnivalesque which only allows a limited perspective of individual
and miraculous change (Langer, 1998) while mimicking its tone of
transgression. Employing a carnivalesque mode explains how they
retain an authority. They maintain the stance of the newspapers as on
the side of common sense, against the powerful, on the side of the little
man and woman even if, as media institutions, they belong to struc-
tures of the capitalist elite. They articulate that stance in the mocking,
deflating language purloined from the common people’s armoury.

The popular tabloids’ version of dialogue is not, as in Bakhtin,

opposed to the closure of the authoritarian word, nor is carnival opposed
to the official hierarchy of culture, rather, their version is deployed as a
strategy to envelop popular traditions within a rhetoric of laughter and
ridicule but emptied of anything other than a hollow, ironic resistance
to the all-pervasive nature of control.

Overall, the mockery, trivialization and conversationalization of the

tabloid newspapers provide a pervasive sense of the ‘carnivalesque’
across the media which they permeate.

From a positive perspective, Docker claims that the carnivalesque

keeps alive alternative conceptions of life and power relations (1994:
150). Although not a panacea it is, as in other rhetorical strategies
within popular culture, a continuity in positioning the popular vis-à-
vis the power elite while being encompassed by its constraints – popular
culture as breathing space we might say.

Conclusion

It is the ‘public idiom’ (Hall, 1978) of these tabloid and tabloidized
newspapers which links them so effectively to the everyday lives of
their readers. In deploying this idiom with continuing commercial and
cultural success, they play an important role in broader technological
and social shifts in terms of news values and the popularization of
public information. It is predominantly the selection of vocabulary, met-
aphorical associations, intertextual references to other popular media
and echoes of colloquial discourse which places them so aggressively

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134

within the contemporary frame. As I have argued elsewhere, to under-
stand contemporary British society we need to be familiar with the
language of the tabloid agenda (Conboy, 2006 2007a).

The tabloids are a very distinctive version of what Halliday has

called a ‘social semiotic’ (Halliday, 1978: 109). In using a range of
distinctive and identifiable registers and dialects (Conboy, 2006), the
tabloids enable the reader to use the newspaper as a textual bridge
between their own experience of the culture in which they live, and
their own attitudes and beliefs within a range of language which is a
close approximation to what they imagine themselves to be using when
they speak of these things themselves. In other words, the tabloids
speak their language. Tabloids combine dialect and register in their
deployment of a language which draws on social sensitivities about
who uses which forms of language. In appropriating the language of the
ordinary people of the country – the non-elite – the tabloids have man-
aged to produce a marketable combination of social class and language.
The language of the popular tabloids, even as it spreads to the elite
press and other media formats, is a commercially astute attempt to
construct what Bourdieu (1990) has called the habitus of its readership;
a clever and profitable game of ventriloquism by the journalists and
sub-editors with a clear appeal to the readers that it targets (Conboy,
2006: 12).

It is important to be able to assess the success of this style of lan-

guage and not dismiss it in the way of the moral panic identified by
Gripsrud (Gripsrud, 2000: 287). Its permeation into other media areas
(Conboy, 2007a) is driven by changes in the acceptability of popular
culture across the board and not just within the news media. This lan-
guage is important not simply as a communicator of these social shifts
but as a component of them at the same time. Tabloid language is not
just about layout, it is not just about finding a new level of vulgarity and
sensation. Its most important characteristic is the way in which it has
extended the appeal of its core values and its cultural references,
designed initially to appeal to a particular strand of blue-collar reader-
ship, to broader social groupings. It brings a patriotic consensus, a deep
political scepticism, a tendency to view the world through the prism of
celebrity and a sexualization to our everyday culture.

Contemporary newspapers across the board display the characteris-

tics of the tabloid in either major or minor keys. The tabloid is a complex
of attitudes, values, technology and economics but ultimately they have
their ultimate expression in language. The language of the tabloids and
its various manifestations as it crosses into mainstream media and other
formats than the traditional popular tabloid newspaper is characterized
by an extreme level of familiarity with its perceived audience; it is

136

Introduction

Technologies of communication in the early twenty-first century
allow a more rapid response and a livelier interaction with the views
of newspaper readers. There is a clear market logic in the response of
newspapers who are keen to incorporate letters, reader-driven fea-
tures and User-Generated Content and to sharpen the specifics of their
lifestyle appeal in order to maintain reader loyalty in an era of media
fragmentation. A casualty of these processes has been the prime func-
tion of ‘news’ which appears to have been replaced in the contemporary
newspapers by a range of views, lifestyle commentary and analysis
appropriate to the various communities targeted by individual news-
papers. All this has continued to shape the language of newspapers in
their engagement with a reconfigured social setting. The relationship
of this linguistic adaptation to broader social changes implicit in a
period of rapid technological innovation will be the focus of this final
chapter. These developments, however, emerge from a longer rela-
tionship between technology and newspapers and it is the shaping
of these technologies historically which has determined to date the
ways in which newspapers are responding to contemporary chal-
lenges to their style and content. The language which is undergoing
such structural and stylistic changes today, for instance, is a relatively
recent adaptation to the all-pervasive influence of the technology of
the telegraph:

The telegraph has been a crucial technological influence on news
practices and forms, establishing the period in which news and
news work assumed its modern pattern: a quest to get the story first,
before one’s competitors, and the use of a nonchronological format
for writing stories. Technological developments in the pursuit of
timeliness continue to impel news coverage towards ‘present-ation’
– that is, closing the gap between the event and its telling, with the
goal of displaying events in ‘real time’. (Bell, 1996: 3–4)

Technology and newspaper
language: The reshaping of
public communication

Technology and Newspaper Language

137

Technology and the language of the press

Throughout the history of the newspaper, technology has influenced
its style and content. On occasions, technologies of transport and com-
munication divorced from issues specifically related to the production
of the newspaper have had an influence on the shaping of newspaper
language just as significant as innovations in the production process
itself. The Daily Mail from 1896 is a good example of this. Harmsworth
introduced new technologies into the production process, developed
national distribution on a scale and with an efficiency never previ-
ously seen and exploited new revenue from carefully targeted
marketing. This meant that it incorporated much of the bite-size, care-
fully constructed boxes of information which had become so successful
in magazine-style digests of news such as the pioneering Tit-Bits of
Newnes (1881) ensuring shorter, more disparate pieces of news framed
in shorter articles with clear headings. But, as always, these technolog-
ical developments enhanced wider social and political trends. They
allowed the newspaper to generate a volume of sales sufficient to cater
to a lower middle class readership at an affordable price and ensured a
product which was written and laid out in a way which would appeal
simultaneously to this newly enfranchised readership and to the adver-
tisers who subsidized it. The mass-market newspaper, in order to fit
the information within the spaces between the plethora of advertise-
ments, separated information from the style of language in which it
arrived at the newspaper and related it in a concise and unadorned
style (Matheson, 2000: 565). This process of internal editing not only
harnessed technological and presentational changes, it also meant that
the new readership could be addressed in a single style and tone of
news more efficiently articulated than before. The launch of the Daily
Mail was the key moment for the development on a mass daily basis of
a vehicle which could effectively combine appeal to a new readership
with all the technologies of mass production and distribution. This
consolidated a much longer process which had seen the centrifugal
spinning of the market between an elite press and a popular Sunday
market.

This internally edited, truncated language was further formalized by

the development of the inverted pyramid layout. This was not a tech-
nique driven solely by a technological appropriation of the telegraph
which had been a reliable form of communication since the 1870s but,
more typical of the impact of technology on newspapers throughout
history, as a combination of commercial and technical responses to the
need for newspapers to improve the communicative quality of their
product (Pöttker, 2003: 509). It emigrated quickly from America to the

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138

United Kingdom within the newly commercialized forces unleashed by
Harmsworth’s Mail and Pearson’s Express. Targeting specific social
classes of readers on behalf of advertisers, who could reasonably expect
that their financial outlay was well directed, required the newspapers
to shape the layout and the content of their product to the perceived
lifestyles and interests of their readers. The inverted pyramid with its
selective prioritizing of key facts in descending order of importance,
therefore, had genuine social impact, meaning that ‘the communicative
quality of the texts improved considerably, making them more under-
standable’ (Pöttker, 2003: 509).

The narrative chronological style characteristic of the late Victorian

period gave way quickly to the new structure (Pöttker, 2003: 503). Even
in the United States, Schudson observes the first examples in the 1880s
and 1890s (Schudson, 1978: 61–87) but this was by no means the stand-
ard form by then. Within a relatively short period, however, it was
swept in on the tide of radical reformulation of the mass dailies to the
extent that by the 1920s the inverted pyramid had become the only
form of reporting taught to journalists (Errico et al., 1997: 8).

The market-driven rationalization of the language of the new mass

newspapers also affected the grammar of the reduced sentences which
were increasingly identifiable as journalistic, meaning that ‘. . . markers
of cause, effect and time adverbs are also usually lacking in news sto-
ries as opposed to more general narratives’ (Bell, 1996: 12).

Beyond the mechanistic changes to the language of the newspapers

which this innovation brought, Carey has argued that it has also had a
profound yet often unacknowledged ideological impact:

The telegraph also reworked the nature of written language and
finally the nature of awareness itself . . . telegraphic journalism
divorced news from an ideological context that could explain and
give significance to events . . . By elevating objectivity and facticity
into cardinal principles, the penny press abandoned explanation as
a primary goal. (Carey, 1987)

Broadcasting: Action and reaction

The establishment of a carefully circumscribed and monitored set of
communication styles through radio and later television broadcasting,
although initially a challenge to newspapers, eventually led to their
being able to develop a set of discourses quite at odds with those of
broadcasting. The latter were mandated as purveyors of a public service
to provide impartial and balanced approaches, especially to political
news. The newspapers were able, like never before, to develop indivi-
dual ‘voices’ which best articulated the views and styles of their readers

Technology and Newspaper Language

139

and to deal more provocatively and in partisan fashion with the
dominant political topics of the day. In the postwar era, it was clear
that newspapers would have to shift their focus from the latest news,
since radio could purvey this more reliably and quickly, and instead to
consolidate their more opinionated and even sensationalist human-
interest aspects.

The newsreels, popular in cinemas throughout the 1920s, had not

been considered a serious source of rivalry by the newspaper owners,
perhaps because of their weekly nature and the fact that viewers had to
leave their homes to watch them, whereas radio journalism caused
alarm among proprietors even in its initial experimental period. On the
launch of the BBC in 1923, the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association
persuaded the government to prohibit news broadcasts before 7 p.m.,
so as not to damage sales of newspapers. The company was initially
forced to rely on news supplied by outside agencies such as Reuters
rather than developing its own newsgathering apparatus; concern about
the potential political impact of this new medium (Smith, 1973: 22)
also led to a ban on political commentary and controversy on the radio.
Throughout the 1930s, however, newspapers were forced to react more
creatively to the perceived threat posed by radio news to their circula-
tions. As the immediacy of their news was becoming less of an
imperative, they were obliged to concentrate more on commentary and
opinion. This was accompanied, particularly in the popular newspa-
pers, by a more visual approach to layout triggered by the revolutionary
redesign of the Daily Express in 1933 with its better use of space, inte-
gration of illustration, bolder headlines and reader-friendly print
(Conboy, 2002: 114–126).

Even though it took many years, well into World War II, for the BBC

to be able to build up its own network of correspondents, by the end of
the war it was the most trusted news medium for the majority of the
British population. As well as the declining public trust in many news-
papers which had insisted until relatively late in the day that there
would be no war, including those who supported the fascists, Engel
claims that the war was the turning point as people switched on their
radios to hear the latest and most accurate news (1996: 141). Laconi-
cally, but with more than a pinch of truth, Tom Driberg argued that the
main role of the BBC had been to teach people to stop believing news-
papers – ‘newspapers at any rate of the more garish sort’ (Briggs, Vol. V,
1995: 69).

The rise in the reputation of radio journalism’s reliability led to three

shifts in the language of the newspapers. First, they had a justification
to be more opinionated in contrast to the prohibition of editorializing
on the BBC and its statutory obligation to maintain political balance.

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140

Second, they began an incremental shift towards patterns of popular
speech and a more ‘rounded’ view of the social experience and aspira-
tions of readers. Third, they developed a more punning, less
informational style of headline, with a diminishing need for the literal
style of radio and later television. All of these trends were more notice-
able first in the popular press but over the course of the next half-century
had become identifiable across the board as part of the process of popu-
larization (LeMahieu, 1988).

Newspapers continued to adapt their style to the further develop-

ments in broadcast journalism introduced through the medium of
television journalism. These changes continued to be framed very much
along the lines of the BBC’s public service remit endorsed by a succes-
sion of government committees’ reports (Sykes Report, 1923; Crawford
Report, 1926; Ullswater Report, 1936; Beveridge Report, 1951).

In fact,

it was the greater trust placed in broadcasting as a medium for news
because of this public service ethos, which ensured that as early as the
1950s, television had become the main source of news about the world
for the general public. In 1955, the ITV introduced a commercially
funded, much more populist, accessible and less deferential style of
news coverage which had borrowed much from American practices
and which prompted the press to take risks and push back boundaries
in a bid to retain the allegiance of young readers (Bingham, 2004: 14).
The mass popular press responded by aiming ‘below television’
(Tunstall, 1996: 59) with gossip and behind-the-scenes material as well
as features and interviews and gossip on the stars whereas the elite
press began experiments with a range of specializations aimed at the
new professional classes, particularly in the public sector. Newspapers
also exploited the new technological environment for their own
purposes and developed an interesting codependence on television as
it provided opportunities for previews and reviews of television pro-
grammes and also, particularly but not exclusively, in the popular
press, a host of stories on the stars and commentary based on the
storylines of popular television programmes. All newspapers began to
employ media correspondents who maintained close links with this
fertile territory for entertaining, profitable and easy news sources.

Despite improved printing and photographic technologies (the best

example being Picture Post from 1938–1957 which provided photo-
illustrated social reports and had a steady readership of over a million)
and despite the improved visual layout and construction of stories in
much of the press, World War II restricted any further development
particularly in the daily press, because paper was in short supply. Post-
war restrictions on paper, in fact, continued until 1955 and kept printing
and paper costs low and advertising space at a premium. What did not

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141

change though were the extremely high production costs in what
remained a labour-intensive industry. From the 1970s, technology had
been available to reduce the dependency of newspapers on a volatile
and disruptive workforce. The organization of print unions and jour-
nalist chapels ensured that the management remained locked into a
labyrinth of archaic production practices. Proprietors and managers
were aware of new printing systems that could have reduced manning.
Print workers knew about them too, and were determined to retain their
jobs by preventing the introduction of cost saving, or, in their terms,
job-destroying technology (Greenslade, 2003: 245).

Once paper was back in plentiful supply, some things moved quickly

while others continued to stagnate. The Sunday Times dominated the
1960s with its serializations and its Insight team of investigative
journalists. The Guardian rose to prominence within a left-leaning cul-
ture of specialist writing for the expanding public sector professions
such as education and social services. Advertising expansion also
brought in extra pagination to allow for more analysis and commentary,
particularly in these areas as the Guardian managed to tie advertising
for jobs in these expanding employment areas with a need for more
content dedicated to these new professions. One of the Guardian’s
strengths was its women’s pages under the leadership of Mary Stott
from 1957–1971 who pioneered feature writing that was a step forward
from the agony aunts and problem pages of magazines and popular
press in attempting to widen the resonance and reach of journalism
aimed at women. As the world began to open up to women, she gave
space to writing about balancing work and child-raising, depression,
physical problems relating to women and she also included letters from
readers who were allowed to play their part in opening up a new public
sphere of women’s discussion and engaged women of all classes, open-
ing up the possibility of direct action and organization to effect change
in their own lives and in the lives of other women (Chambers, Steiner
and Fleming, 2004: 39). Other newspapers, especially the elite press,
moved commercially to include more of interest to increasingly afflu-
ent and socially engaged professional women readers.

The trend towards naming individual journalists, particularly in the

specialist columns, gathered momentum. More commentary, often
depending on idiosyncratic opinion, meant that individual journalists’
writing could hardly continue to be published without a byline. Tele-
vision increasingly needed articulate commentators on the sorts of
specialist subjects now covered in the papers which meant, in turn,
that named journalists could enhance their reputation and that of their
paper by appearing live on screen as expert contributors. The last
bastion of anonymity was the Times which resisted until 1967. Another

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142

significant accelerant to the rise of the named specialist journalist was
the figure of the newscaster, particularly on the ITN from 1955 and star
interviewers such as David Frost and Robin Day, whose personal styles
made up much of the appeal of television. Seymour-Ure has commented
on the wider implications of the decline of anonymity:

Anonymity, like the uniform of nurses or the police, highlights the
role, not the person performing it. In journalism, it therefore bol-
stered the idea of objectivity in reporting the news. Its disappearance
fitted an era in which electronic media were taking over the ‘hot’
news role and papers were selling the personal expertise of their
staff at interpretation, comment, analysis, more than for traditional
hard news. (Seymour-Ure, 1996: 155)

The Wapping Revolution

As 1896 had triggered the first mass newspapers, 1986 marked the
beginning of a radically new era for newspapers and, albeit obliquely,
for their language. Over one weekend, Rupert Murdoch moved the
entire British newspaper production of his News International
Company to a purpose-built site in the east end of London at Wapping.
The building of the facility was no secret but no one could be sure of its
purpose. He had suggested it was to provide a home for a new London
evening paper, the London Post but this turned out to be nothing but a
mischievous rumour. The plant was designed with security as a prior-
ity, predicting the political turmoil it would provoke as Murdoch
refused the legitimacy of the printers’ strike action and dismissed them
without redundancy payment while persuading most of the journalists
at astonishingly short notice to begin work at this new site, by crossing
a hostile picket line. It was a prolonged and decisive struggle between
Murdoch and the print unions and their allies but one which Murdoch
won, altering the face of British newspapers as he did so. The events
which began on 26 January 1986 were not termed the Wapping Revolu-
tion flippantly, as this was literally an overnight change in the
organization of a whole industry despite the fact that, like most revolu-
tions, it had been smouldering for a decade or so before it erupted.
Rothermere caught the abruptness of this change when he claimed:
‘There was before Wapping and there was after Wapping’ (MacArthur,
1988: 106) and it has been correctly described as the ‘decisive moment’
in the history of the British press (Eldridge, Kitzinger and Williams,
1997: 37).

Yet Wapping’s ‘new’ technologies were simply not that new. In 1973,

the Nottingham Evening Post had become the first to experiment
with technology which allowed journalists to directly input their copy.

Technology and Newspaper Language

143

The Royal Commission on the Press as early as 1977 had identified that
the new technologies available even at that point would enable
improved management and profitability of national newspapers. Tech-
nologically, Fleet Street was straggling behind. Reuters and the Stock
Exchange were already using electronic transmission but the sudden
shift to a modernized method of producing national newspapers would
depend on political manoeuvring as much as technological innovation.
By the mid-1980s, the technology benefited from a political climate
which was extremely favourable to employers and a government which
appeared to have customized anti-trades union legislation in order to
smooth the profitable transition to new production practices on behalf
of favoured newspaper owners.

Direct journalist-input without printers had been trialled by Eddie

Shah’s Messenger group of provincial newspapers in 1983 when he
emerged victorious in his conflict with the NGA print union. The new
journalist-input allowed for late corrections and updates to be included
giving much more flexibility than before along with a much reduced
wages bill. The 1984 Trade Union Act further eased the introduction of
this technology. For instance, it restricted picketing to one’s own place
of work and limited the numbers entitled to picket. There could be no
secondary action such as sympathy strikes in support of sacked or sus-
pended workers and since Wapping was constituted as a separate
company, any picketing by Murdoch’s staff would be illegal. In addi-
tion, through the use of Australian road haulage company, Thomas
Nationwide Transport, Murdoch also eliminated any interference by
rail unions. Computer-based typesetting replaced the linotype produc-
tion which had necessitated skilled and experienced printers and
allowed for the immediate dismissal of 5,000 printers (Goodhart and
Wintour, 1986: xi) which lowered costs, promised less interference in
production, increased profits and quickly led to a more supine work-
force of journalists on individual contracts.

Important though it is to set the political context, it is, however, the

impact of these changes on the style and substance of newspapers
post-Wapping which we need to concentrate on. It became much easier
to produce additional sections and extra pagination as well as updating
stories right up to deadline. Colour printing was also easier to incorpo-
rate. As a direct consequence of the Wapping Revolution, the 1990s
saw trends accelerate towards more features, a ‘big expansion in “non-
news”’ (Tunstall, 1996: 155).

Buoyant advertising markets assisted the extension of consumer

journalism with less traditional news as a proportion of the paper and
more sections on lifestyle, consumer issues and more cross-fertilization
with other aspects of the entertainment industries, for example, sport,

The Language of Newspapers

144

fashion and motoring. Post-1986 newspapers doubled or even trebled
the number of their supplements and these sections contributed signifi-
cantly to the identity of the papers and the image they wished to project
to readers and of course advertisers.

The ‘commentariat’ has also grown as part of the heavyweight

branding and identification of newspapers in an extremely competitive
market. There has been an increase in the numbers of columnists of a
variety of styles: polemical, analytical and satirical (McNair, 2008: 116).
It is no surprise that Richard Littlejohn, as a columnist on the Daily
Mail, is reputed to be the highest paid and therefore literally the most
valued journalist in the country.

The Independent, founded in 1986, foregrounded photography and

boasted the most complete arts and leisure listings of any national daily.
The Guardian pioneered the second and third daily sections and espe-
cially its Tabloid G2. Yet it was the Independent on Sunday from 1990
which introduced innovations which were to materially accelerate
many of these trends. It perfected a technique for heat-set colour print-
ing on cheaper larger format paper which not only allowed more space
for adverts but also allowed longer review material for journalists. The
growth in supplements, length of review and shift towards a greater
amount of consumer-driven, lifestyle journalism meant a proportionate
reduction in old-style news and even in the traditional reporting style.
This did not mean the disappearance of the inverted pyramid but cer-
tainly has contributed to its gradual marginalization within the totality
of the newspaper.

A further significant observation in the post-Wapping newspaper

concerns the politics of these newly expanded products. Despite
increases in pagination and the growth of various styles of specialist
features, Curran’s research indicates that there remained ‘significant
difference . . . between a politicized elite press and a relatively depoliti-
cized mass press’ (Curran and Seaton, 2003: 93). Furthermore, the
technological revolution did nothing to change the ideological range of
the British press. It might have been heralded as a brave new techno-
logical era but it was structured by the old political economy. It
reinforced a newspaper journalism led by commercialized consumer
choice rather than one led by an altruistic vision of a contribution
within a public sphere. The move to Wapping was a decisive political
and technological step in that direction witnessing crucially: ‘the
decline of resources, manpower and time available for campaigning
journalism’ (Williams, 1998: 249).

This is a point which has been reinforced by more recent quantita-

tive research as more pages filled by less full-time journalists. Lewis,
Williams and Franklin (2008a 2008b) and Davies (2008) claim that

Technology and Newspaper Language

145

contemporary journalists are driven by pressures of deadlines and
profit margins to provide more copy in less time which draws uncriti-
cally on agency and PR material leaving less scope for independent,
investigative journalism.

The online challenge: Impact and adaptation

The impact of the internet on the form and content of newspapers is as
radical a change as this news medium has ever had to deal with and
brings with it fundamental challenges to our social understanding of
their function: ‘Changes in form and distribution . . . change our con-
cept of news’ (Lewis, 2003: 96). This relationship to the social context
of the web is inevitably having a related impact on the language and
layout of newspapers. However, we still need to reaffirm the fact that
communication history indicates that we should not be too quick to
pen the obituary of the newspaper given the widespread evidence that
‘The introduction of new media have rarely caused the elimination of
existing media, although audiences and consequently their revenue
bases do often shift’ (Burnett and Marshall, 2003: 1). Newspapers need
to adapt to this paradigm shift in mass communications and are already
doing so, partially by incorporation of their product to an online format
and partly by an adaptation of the printed product to the structures and
capacity of the internet.

With the advent of the internet, the language as well as the layout

and accessibility of the newspaper have begun to change out of all
recognition. They have done this in part to retain readers but also to
align themselves more to the apparent democratic imperatives of online
interactivity. Boxes, annotations, sidebars, blogs, web-links, user gener-
ated content, responses to journalists’ pieces in virtual debate, all
contribute to changes not only in the newspapers but in their relation-
ship with the readers as part of wider changes in the social nature of
newspaper language. As well as it being progressively impossible to
distinguish between online and paper versions of newspapers because
of their inter-relatedness, there is a further impact on newspapers as
they begin to import and adapt the layout and design features of their
web-based versions in their printed columns; sidebars, topbars, break-
ing ticker tapes, references to hypertext and website material. The lack
of closure in online news is impacting upon the length and structure of
stories in printed form as it invites readers to cross-reference inside the
newspaper and across formats to online links but, paradoxically it may
seem, elsewhere in the commentary sections the newspaper is provid-
ing increased space for prolonged opinion and commentary pieces
which would not fit onto a screen version in one viewing. This indicates

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146

how incorporation of online influences into the newspaper mainstream
is taking place, at the same time as a further differentiation of the news-
paper from its online and broadcast competitors/complements. This
constitutes a complex re-engagement which is characteristic in its
dynamics of the whole of newspaper history; dealing with alternative
formats and changing technological demands as well as maintaining a
language to socially engage with readership and community.

The way people are reading newspapers is changing fundamentally,

fracturing the traditional audience-design model (Bell: 1984). They
need to be much more dynamic and populist, using the new technolog-
ical platform to provide a language which can couple the older idea of
the mass with newer, more idiosyncratic appropriations as articulated
in Negroponte (1995) and Lasica (2002):

The interactive nature of the medium also demands new approaches
and, for journalism, it has become clear that the tried and tested
top-down forms, developed over the past three centuries around
print, have been made obsolete by the new media and are increas-
ingly irrelevant to the lives of many readers. (Hall, 2001: 2–3)

The online variant is having a flowback effect on the printed versions
of newspapers. Newspapers in print currently try to accommodate the
hyperlinks of cyberspace by providing printed hyperlink ‘addresses’,
online contact details and e-mails as well as encouraging association
with the broader ‘brand’ across to the online product itself. The com-
pression and visualization of much of the material now presented in
printed newspapers match the scannability of the shorter paragraphs,
bulleted lists, news pegs and simple headlines of the online variety.
In addition to presentation, journalism’s content has responded, for
instance, to the challenges posed by blogging by attempting to provide
its own journalists’ blog-responses within the online version of the
newspaper. The extent to which this, by itself, will succeed is open to
question. The tug-of-war between the ethical claims on public commu-
nication between bloggers and journalists (Singer, 2007) do not seem to
have fundamentally shifted the ground of the debate since Bardoel
reasserted the role of the journalist as ‘broker of social consensus’
(Bardoel 1996: 297). Indeed, the continuing primacy of mainstream
journalism and journalists, especially newspaper journalists, as sources
for online bloggers’ own reports suggest, ‘a more complementary rela-
tionship between weblogs and traditional journalism . . .’ (Reese et al.,
2007: 235). This relationship continues the trend for weblogs to repro-
duce as opposed to challenge the discourse of mainstream news media
(Haas, 2005: 387) despite the fact that there is a plethora of alternative
news media available (Atton, 2002) which could, in theory, destabilize

Technology and Newspaper Language

147

the conventional hierarchies of topic and source provided by the
mainstream media.

Boardman claims, however, that the differences are more fundamen-

tal than a shift of product or an imitation of certain stylistic elements
implying that any short-term reconciliation between printed news-
papers and online versions or any similarities between their modes of
operation might be short-lived:

The brain works by association and connection, and not in the
linear way that the post-Gutenberg tradition of literacy requires of
the reader.
Hypertext is a way of hard-wiring these associations and connec-
tions with other documents – making permanent jumping-off
points part of an electronic text . . . The hard-wired jumping-off
points that take you to other documents are called hyperlinks.
Written text allows us to replay the content of our experience and
thought, but the revolutionary assumption behind hypertext is that
we are replaying a narrative more like the thought process itself.
(Boardman, 2005: 10)

Yet despite such claims that online news provides something dramati-
cally novel in its ‘non-linear’ storytelling (Massey, 1), newspapers
have rarely been read in a linear fashion and their structure and style
seem complementary to online reading patterns rather than opposed to
them. In addition, it seems clear that one prerequisite which online
and hard copy newspaper will continue to share is a reliance on: ‘. . .
traditional methods of careful and unbiased reporting, using compel-
ling writing . . .’ (Ward, 2002; Wilby, 2006; Barnett, 2008).

There are potentially democratic bonuses to these developments.

For instance, in the first internet war, Lewis claims some of the benefits
of online publication of news provided journalism with a greater range
of involvement and dynamism:

. . . it was not only regular journalists who reported on Kosovo, gov-
ernmental agencies, international organizations. Local witnesses,
freelance journalists, news agencies, academics and interested oth-
ers all used the internet to publish news, background and comment
on the crisis. (Lewis, 2003: 96)

Print newspapers are using features of the internet to enhance their
appeal to readers, particularly a new generation of readers, providing
what Pavlik claims might be ‘a potentially better form of “contextual-
ized” journalism’ (Pavlik, 2001: xi). However, there are paradoxes at
work in the democratic promise of online interactivity; on the one
hand, the internet appears to flatten the hierarchy of traditional news-
paper communication to readers while on the other the role of elite

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148

commentators on the newspapers become highlighted and amplified
as opinion brokers and gatekeepers to popular opinion through blogs
and e-correspondence.

On the positive side, the elite press in particular have benefited from

their ability to provide what is missing in instantaneous reporting; a
reflective and analytical mode of commentary (continuing a trend from
1930s under the impact of another technological innovation) unavaila-
ble in most other news media although one increasingly framed by the
values of the status quo. Furthermore, they have been able to offer spin-
offs in the form of exhaustive web portals from their own archives to
enable readers to pursue interests with increasing depth. Thus, elite
newspapers become enablers, opening up from their own output into a
range of parallel sources. The websites of national and local newspa-
pers and interactive e-mail addresses of prominent columnists allow a
more in-depth view of contemporary journalism while online archiving
of stories and their links to related news sites is a boon for the engaged
reader participant in the twenty-first century public sphere. This serv-
ice is now opened up to more than the specialist researcher with huge
potential for a broader and deeper perception of how events in the
world are interlinked.

Conclusion

There are no easy or inevitable teleologies for newspaper language.
They continue to exclude as much as include in their variants on pub-
lic discourse. Up to the postwar era there was, according to Greenslade
(2003: 628–629), very little directly targeted to a female audience. This
has not changed to a large extent as Tuchman (1978) has identified in
her withering assessment of the ‘symbolic annihilation’ of women in
the quality press; to which we could add the almost complete ‘sexuali-
sation’ (Holland, 1998) in the popular mass dailies.

Van Zoonen (1998) has observed that journalism is changing but

within newspapers and their online variants, this change has merely
provided more opportunities for the development of ‘feminine’ styles
of writing in consumer-oriented and market-driven news such as human
interest and emotional investment and the rise of the female confes-
sional column (Heller, 1999):

. . . news is not inherently feminine or masculine. It is therefore not
helpful to refer to the postmodern shift to infotainment as a ‘femi-
nization’ of news . . . In the short run, however, femininity and
so-called ‘feminine news values’ with an emphasis on human-
interest stories are more marketable and are being exploited at the

Technology and Newspaper Language

149

very moment when news is shifting as a genre from news to info-
tainment. (Chambers, Steiner and Fleming, 2004: 230)

However, while we might agree thematically, there is significant
evidence that ‘real’ news continues to remain stubbornly ‘androcentric’
(Simpson, 1993) and this can still be observed in the fabric of the
newspaper’s language today.

From the perspective of ethnic inclusivity, it is clear that elite

racism, institutional racism and textual examples of everyday racism
continue in contemporary newspaper journalism and continue to
provide a significant obstacle to a more accurate social portrait of
Britain in the twenty-first century. This is, however, hardly surprising
when one considers the evidence of the Society of Editors’ report
Diversity in the Newsroom (2004) which demonstrates how a tiny
proportion of journalists from ethnic minorities are employed on a
range of local newspapers in areas with significant ethnic minority
populations. This reinforces the point made by Van Dijk (1993) that
within the newspaper industry there exists a patterning of selection of
both news content and personnel, which is oriented towards a particu-
lar set of assumptions about the ethnic composition of the country.
It is therefore no surprise that his research from 1991 has been endorsed
by recent findings about the patterning of news about ethnic minori-
ties in Britain in recent times (Richardson, 2004; Conboy, 2006, Greater
London Authority, 2007; Runnymede, 2008).

The Sutton Trust’s The Educational Background of Leading Journal-

ists (2006) found a similar tale of under-representation of a wider social
base, with independent schools and Oxford and Cambridge university
background seemingly a distinct advantage in seeking advancement in
the news media. National readership surveys indicate the extent to
which newspaper readership is demarcated along social class lines
while patterns of ownership and control have meant that a growing
diversity of public representation has been severely stunted (Curran
and Seaton, 2003: 102).

There has been much hypothesized about the future of the news-

paper and other journalistic formats under the influence of technological
developments such as the internet. They may be considered as part of a
much longer debate on the impact of technology on journalism. As has
been noted on many occasions, no mass medium has completely sup-
planted an existing one. The process of media development has always
tended to be an additive one. The trends in new media influences on
the contemporary newspaper seem to bear this out. The elite press have
been quicker to develop cross-referenced archives with sophisticated
website material while even popular tabloid newspapers seem to be

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150

willing to complement the daily high street sale in an increasingly cut-
throat market by an increasing web-presence.

Crystal sees the proliferation of English as the first truly global lan-

guage and the related phenomenon of the language of the internet as
two fronts of a revolutionary system. He sees the internet as being nei-
ther written nor spoken in its discourse but as a novel combination of
the two; something sui generis and very much in formation at the
present time (Crystal, 2004). This has interesting implications for the
language of newspapers as they move online and as the internet has a
flow-back influence on the content of newspapers in their continuing
hard copy with a readership ever more used to online variants of news
and other information and entertainment. Yet global English and the
English of characteristically British newspapers continue to be differ-
ent enough to confirm that newspapers continue to thrive because they
can provide a cultural approximation of the specifics of time and place
in their idiom and values. This is their attraction and the secret of their
continuing success, not to be swallowed whole within a globalized,
technological monolith but to find ways to retain what makes them
relevant to specific audiences.

The traditional taxonomy of news values which include cultural

proximity, socio-cultural values and consonance, will all continue to
structure what particular communities want from their news and how
it carries meaning for them. In many ways, the technological potential
of the internet to provide a global, almost utopian model for news
beyond traditional constraints may prove illusory. It is the socio-
cultural specifics of the language of the news which determines the
shape of the news itself. This is what needs to evolve if newspapers, in
whatever form, are to continue to provide a forum for an increasingly
diverse audience. No matter what the technological configuration,
newspapers will sink or swim depending on the ways in which their
language can capture and sustain a socially and culturally rooted
audience.

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Index

175

readership 79–80, 95, 98
Victorian heydays 86–8

Sunday Times 141
supplements

post-1986 growth 144

tabloid(s) 2, 104, 113–14, 134

attitudes to monarchy 129–30
Harmsworth’s

contributions 118–19

tabloid ethos 114
tabloid idiom 114, 133–4
tabloidization 5, 130–2
Tatler 39, 40
technological innovations

impact on print journalism

and 142–3

impact on newspaper

ownership 82, 97

see also communication technology

telegraph

influence on news practices and

forms 136, 137, 138

news transmission 94, 112
telegraphese 92–3

television journalism 2, 131, 138, 140
Terrific Register 68–9
Terry, Walter 128
Thirty Years’ War (1620)

periodical news and 21

Thomas Nationwide Transport 143
The Thunderer 83

see also Times

Tillett, Ben 119
Times 92, 112, 130

anonymity and  141
dominance and influence  78, 82–5
identity of  91
political independence  56

Tit-bits 107, 111, 116, 137
Titbits From All The Interesting

Books, Periodicals, and
Newspapers of the World 106

Tooke, William 53
To The Right Puissant and Terrible

Priests, My Clergie Masters of
the Confention House 18

Townsend, Peter  129–30
Trade Union Act (1984)  143
Trade Union Congress (TUC)  119, 120
True and Exact Relation 26
True Diurnall 26
True Relation 30
Trust, Sutton  149
TUC see Trade Union Congress
Tudor monarchs